The weekend marked the 20th anniversary of the release of Halo 2, and the shooter’s state-of-the-art counterparts celebrated by showcasing classic multiplayer maps and long-lost levels. However, from the dust of time, observations regarding the work on the sequel that took place in 2004 also emerge. Rolling Stone interviewed two key designers game and made a entertaining discovery. The Flood (a sickly pale alien plague that briefly turns Halo into a sci-fi horror movie) was partly inspired by a colorful and innocent children’s book about a kind elephant.
Halo and its sequel had a smaller development team than an equivalent blockbuster today might have. This meant that some designers had to take odd jobs outside their wheelhouse. This is what led Lorraine and Robert McLees, the husband and wife team who worked at Bungie during the development of Halo 2, to create things for the game beyond what their job description required.
Although Robert was a weapons designer, for example, he was also responsible for developing concept art for Flood. He particularly remembers creating an infectious form of the creature (diminutive, terrifying worms that burst open and infect their victims with spores).
The first concept “looked like a cross between a house centipede and a black pudding,” he told Rolling Stone. “It was gross, but it didn’t look very busy.”
Dissatisfied with his first pass, the artist discovered the perfect shape of the alien creature just in time for his next attempt. It turned out to be an image that had been “wandering around the shadowy parts of my brain” since childhood.
“When my daughter was born, I collected all the Golden Key books that I remembered from my own childhood so that I could read to her before she went to bed at night. And there it was, in A saggy, baggy elephanta palm tree thrown into the air by dancing elephants – a strange shape that had haunted my subconscious for thirty-odd years. The Flood Infection Form was created on this basis.”
You can see the exact palm tree he mentions reading this book on YouTube. Indeed, the tree’s roots do evoke the distinctive leg tendrils of the Flood creature. The trunk also looks very similar to that ugly conical appendage that crowns the alien larva’s head. So I think we should all thank children’s illustrator Gustaf Tenggren for inspiring the terrifying monster. Tidy.
The interview is an intriguing read if you’re a Halo boss. Both designers openly talk about how the studio crisis influenced their lives, even when they were dealing with a newborn child. Lorraine, who was responsible for the game’s cover art, was also the person who designed the Pillar Of Autumn, the human spaceship from the first Halo. That’s great. If I’m ever asked to imagine a “human military spaceship,” to this day I immediately bring this ship to mind.

Many of the problems that Bungie’s developers have experienced have already been well documented. One of the studio engineers said the environment was brutal “I almost killed Bungie as a company.” Fellow lead engineer Chris Butcher once told our sister site Eurogamer that it was he worked seven days a week for months. Or as he put it:
“The Halo 2 moment was, ‘Oh my God, we’re screwed. We will all die». It was really demanding to deal with these months and months of this emotional, negative tone, but at the same time we did a lot of amazing work.
The Rolling Stone interview actually confirms much of this story.
“Bungie had never had good managers until then,” said Robert McLees. “They had creators who were being forced into management roles, and at the same time they were still in their artistic roles – essentially working two jobs. This worked well when there were 12 of us. It worked worse when there were 30 of us. It broke down when there were 60 of us.
“We really didn’t know what was going to happen at that point,” Lorraine added. “It doesn’t matter whether we succeed or not. For the young Bungie crew, this was a crucial period of success. The big burnout.”
Crunch continues to be a problem for game developers. The management of the studio working on Star Citizen recently imposed a mandatory seven-day working week on its employees. Diablo IV employees also complained about unsustainable work demands.