Question 3 (Destiny)

by MartyTheElder, Saturday, April 09, 2016, 23:26 (2938 days ago) @ Revenant1988

Q.) One of my favorite things in Halo is Joe Staten's Grunt voice. There's got to be a story there somewhere (and maybe it's come up in other interviews I've not seen) about how exactly his grunty-voice came to be, why you all allowed him to do it. How did that happen?

A: Great question. Ok, here ya go.

While working on Halo, we had a plan to have an alien language. I was told that someone was going to work on the alien script. In the meantime we needed placeholder dialog for the aliens. We took the existing marine recordings and used the already cut and implemented AI categories to test in-game. For the elites we took Sgt Johnson's lines, pitched them down and reversed them. For the grunts we took the "scared" marine (we're all gonna die man!) and pitched his up a couple steps so we could distinguish grunts from marines.

That version of the game was played by our team, testers, and user testing people for quite a long time. Meanwhile, we were getting closer to shipping and I still didn't have an alien language. Then we found out that most everyone loved the grunt voice because he made them laugh. So, we never got alien dialog, we had to enlist Joe Staten to become the grunt, pitch his voice up and that's what we shipped. By the way, we never changed the elite voice. Wort wort wort is Sgt Johnson's go go go backwards and pitched down.