In 2001, Halo: Combat Evolved hit store shelves and completely revolutionized the console first-person shooting market. In the latest issue of Game Informer, I traced the origins of the Halo franchise with early members of Bungie, the original studio behind the Halo franchise. As part of that conversation, Master Chief voice actor Steve Downes repeated a claim he made on his personal YouTube channel: Bungie and Microsoft originally planned to recast Master Chief and Cortana with Hollywood talent to broaden the mainstream appeal. While that didn’t end up coming to pass – Downes and Jen Taylor still depict Chief and Cortana, respectively, to this day – I couldn’t help but dig more into that with those who were involved in the conversation.
During my discussion with Downes and Taylor, we got on the topic of people finding out they were the voices of these characters. For Downes, he was visiting a friend’s brother’s house, and they had a group of kids playing Xbox. “It never even crossed my mind that we would do this again,” Downes recalls. “I walked through the living room one day, and [the kids] were playing Combat Evolved, and I jogged my memory, because, believe me, I forgot about it; it wasn’t anything that I remembered doing, but I saw the game, and I was like, ‘Wait a second… ‘ and I think I almost said it to myself out loud, ‘I think I voiced a character in that game.’ And the kids stopped, and they said, ‘Well who?’ And I said, ‘I can’t remember the name, but I think he was the main guy in the game,’ and they said, ‘Master Chief?’ and I was like, ‘Yeah, yeah, Master Chief.’ So within, I don’t know, 20 or 30 minutes, every kid in the neighborhood is over at the house with a copy of the game on Xbox, wanting to get it signed. That was my ‘A-ha!’ moment that, ‘What do we have here?’ and it was a life-changing moment that continues.’
Halo: Combat Evolved
Taylor speculates that maybe the fact that nobody knew who voiced the characters was by design. “I felt in the beginning, Bungie didn’t really want people to know who we were, because they really wanted you to have the characters in your mind when you were listening to our voices and not, ‘Oh, that blonde lady,'” she says. “They weren’t selling us, they were selling the characters.”
When Downes hears this, he chimes in with his assertion that a recast was on the table. “There was no reach out from [Bungie],” he says. “In fact, as we found out later, they had every intention of replacing us with famous people.”
Taylor, seemingly having heard this before, pushes back a little, suggesting they need corroboration from Halo: Combat Evolved audio director and composer Marty O’Donnell. “Well, you say that,” she says with a smile. “Does Marty back us up? We’ve gotta ask Marty!”
Halo 2
After claiming that O’Donnell does, in fact, back up the claim that a recasting was on the table for Halo 2, Downes shares some of the names that were on the table, but with a caveat. “I don’t know if this part’s true, but it makes for a fun story that Tom Cruise was considered as the guy who would voice Master Chief,” he says. “They were going to replace both of us – well, they were certainly going to replace me, I don’t know about Jen – and Marty said the conversation was, ‘Why are we fixing something that isn’t broken? The game did great as it was. Why are we gonna mess with it now? What’s the point?’ And thank God cooler heads – thank God for me [laughs] – cooler heads prevailed, and they did not make any changes.”
With Downes’ claim now aired, and a corroborating source explicitly stated, I reached out to O’Donnell to discuss, among other things, the casting Downes and Taylor. Though Taylor expressed doubt that Cruise would have taken on the role in the early ’00s, given how big he was at the time, it turns out there was some truth to it. According to O’Donnell, the conversations were short, and only started once Halo: Combat Evolved became a big enough success to get him into rooms in which he’d never had been.
Halo 2
“That was for Halo 2; we were never going to recast them in the first one, because Halo had no cachet, really, until three years later, after it became a million-seller, and then a 2 million-seller,” O’Donnell says. “Microsoft had sort of shipped me out to Hollywood shindigs and parties, and they saw that there was a lot of anticipation for Halo 2. I’d be in Hollywood, and I had already been interested in, like, ‘Well, maybe I can start casting some actors who are…’ I wanted actors who liked games and were already fans of this new game called Halo. I didn’t want to get actors who were just looking for a big payday, because there was no big payday.”
In the midst of these Hollywood-centric events, O’Donnell was approached by someone from one of the biggest talent agencies, Creative Artists Agency. “One of the guys came up to me at one of these parties and puts his arm around me,” O’Donnell recalls. “‘Marty, you know, it’s time! This is a big deal. You’re in the big times now. You’ve gotta step everything up. We represent Julia Roberts and Tom Cruise.’ Now, Tom Cruise was already a Bungie fan, believe it or not; he had played Myth, so this wasn’t the first time we’d heard about Tom Cruise. It was this guy basically saying, ‘We should make this deal to get Tom Cruise to be Master Chief, and Julia Roberts to be Cortana in Halo 2.'”
Halo 2
According to O’Donnell’s recounting of the story, he was less than impressed. “I was like, ‘Wow that’s really cool! Yeah, thanks a lot,’ and I was just like, ‘What a slimeball,'” he recalls. “I’m just like, ‘Okay, I’ve got to be really careful in Hollywood, take advantage of who I can, get the people I think are cool,’ but I knew that would have ruined everything. The fans would never had accepted – because I know game fans are not necessarily blown away by big stars, they’re blown away by solid gameplay and emotionally compelling stories, and they were blown away by what we had done. But they wanted us to stay true to that relationship between us and the fans, and if we just threw Tom Cruise and Julia Roberts, who I would have had a blast working with them – if I could have done that to begin with, maybe that could have been cool – but there was no way that I could replace Jen Taylor and Steve Downes, because the fans already had a relationship with those voices, because they were Master Chief and Cortana. I just could not think of replacing that, so that was never really in the cards to be considered, but I like to dangle it over Jen and Steve every so often, like, ‘You know, I could have gotten Julia Roberts and Tom Cruise,’ [laughs] It’s just a fun story. It never went any further than that one conversation.”
Even though the conversation about Tom Cruise and Julia Roberts ended there, it is fun to imagine a world where those celebrities voiced those characters. However, it certainly would not be the same, and likely would have alienated large portions of the fan base. Additionally, they would have almost certainly abandoned those roles by now, as gaming’s tumultuous history with one-off celebrity voice actors has shown. Meanwhile, in this timeline, Downes and Taylor still provide the voices for Master Chief and Cortana to this day, even returning to the booth to re-record their lines for Halo: Campaign Evolved, which gave them a chance to deliver their now-iconic performances with more perspective on the characters and franchise as a whole.
Halo: Campaign Evolved
Though both actors have certainly grown in the roles, returning to re-record their original performances in Halo: Combat Evolved for this year’s Halo: Campaign Evolved, was a bit daunting for Taylor. “I was intimidated,” Taylor admits. “I felt like, you know, did we capture lightning in a bottle? Am I in the right headspace for this? Am I going to be so intimidated by who this character is now, which I didn’t have that information back in the day. I was creating her from the very beginning, and now I was intimidated by it. In the end, it was really fun. I did a lot more ADR for this than I’ve ever done – I guess I did ADR for the fourth game, and for this one, because they shot it in Budapest, interestingly enough. So, all the motion capture, because we were on strike at the time, as I recall, so they did all the motion capture in Budapest, so I was matching to another actress, who did it physically, did the motion capture, so that’s always an interesting challenge, and one I’m not sure I’m very good at, honestly. So, we’ll see, but it was, in the end, it was fun, because it was a great group of people who were working on it with us, and that always makes it. It was a group of people who were really excited about it, which makes you excited. You can’t help but feel that.”
Downes even chimes in with high praise for the process of re-recording his lines for Halo Studios’ new remake. “I don’t think I’ve had more fun voicing for Halo than I had for Campaign Evolved,” he says. “It was such a unique experience to, as Jen said, you get to revisit where it all began, but there were challenges, because you don’t want to mimic what you did. You want to honor the origin part of it. Especially on some of the big lines; I didn’t want to just parrot it. But I didn’t want to stray too far away from what people remember, and as Jen said, the people we worked with while recording were passionate Halo people, and people who had been with this game for a very long time, and were deeply involved in the story and the lore and all of it. That’s like being surrounded by friends, not just a director.”
Halo: Campaign Evolved
Based on what I played of Halo: Campaign Evolved, the performances have evolved alongside the campaign, but not in a way that flies in the face of the original recordings. Instead, the lines feel more confident, which could only be achieved through having the same actors in the same roles for a quarter century. Halo: Campaign Evolved arrives on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC on July 28. For more, if you’re a Game Informer subscriber, be sure to check out our latest cover story.