JOHN HOWARD WAS ON CLOUD nine. Since moving to Bellevue and joining Microsoft, Howard and the FASA team had shipped MechWarrior 4, their first installment in the series. Crimson Skies, the studio's next project, had shown well at E3 in June 2000 a few months earlier. In October, one month from liftoff, FASA founder Jordan Weisman approached Howard with a proposal.

"I was talking to Jason Jones," Weisman said, referring to the brain behind Bungie's game designs. "He's usually design lead, but they've got to ship Halo for Xbox and they're looking for a lead designer so Jason can produce and lead engineering."

Howard agreed right away. He had loved Bungie's games since 1994 when he had worked at an ad agency alongside future Bungie developer Derek Carroll. When the studio closed for Thanksgiving, the two bachelors, who had no family in the area, stayed put in Chicago. To fight off holiday blues, Carroll called Howard and made a suggestion.

"The Marathon demo is out," he said. To tease players ahead of Marathon's release on December 21, the studio uploaded Marathon Demo version 0.0 to America On-Line's comp.sys.mac.games group on Wednesday, November 23, one day before Thanksgiving. "I'm going to download it and order pizza. You should come to the office."

"We played one-on-one Marathon for, like, nine hours on Thanksgiving. It's still one of the best Thanksgivings of my entire life," Howard says.

Tying up the office network playing Marathon was Howard's gateway into game design. He combed AOL and bulletin board systems (digital corkboards where users could post messages and share files) and downloaded tools to build maps for the game. It was his introduction to game development Now, he had the opportunity to contribute to Halo, the evolution of Bungie's take on first-person shooting.

"When I heard about Halo, I was like, 'I want to work on that. What body part do I have to sell?' I went from crunch mode on Crimson Skies to even before that was done, even before we'd gold-mastered it, I was working on Halo."

Howard knew little about Halo besides the trailer Bungie had shown to the public at E3 over the summer. The footage depicted fast, action-packed gameplay from a third-person perspective. Soldiers and space marines piloted vehicles, fired futuristic weaponry designed by aliens, and explored vast wilderness areas teeming with wildlife.

Halo's developers offered no playable demo at E3. Howard quickly discovered why. "It was all smoke and mirrors. It wasn't even a game yet," he says.

Bungie had retooled Halo as a first-person shooter prior to E3. Microsoft had needed the team to show something so the public didn't go too long without an update. Reworking the game would require Herculean effort. Howard and Bungie were up to the task. "What I think is brilliant about Bungie's culture, and this is still true in my opinion, even as big as they are, is the default answer is 'yes.' The people who will respond to yes and make yes happen are a rare breed."

No part of Halo was off-limits. Every polygonal was touched up or built from scratch. Taking the wheel as lead designer, Howard was surprised to find that the game's weapons existed only as a flurry of ideas collected in a text file. No artificial intelligence had been written. The team had wanted to build dozens of levels. They would only have time for 10. In the game's final months, the team created alternate versions of the first three maps and slotted them in as the final levels.

"That's why the single-player levels are flipped versions of each other," Howard explains. "We literally didn't have time to make 10 unique levels."

Designing levels presented one obstacle. There were more, each magnified by the fact that first-person shooters on consoles were few, and fewer still were considered worthwhile. The most popular, Rare's GoldenEye 007 for Nintendo 64, was a good model, but not one Bungie could replicate. The N64's controller had a single analog stick, while the Xbox controller, though still a work in progress, would have two.

"How do the controls work? How should an FPS be on a console? How can we make this not suck?" Howard remembers the team asking. "Everyone was used to playing FPS on PC. Those foundational things, we had to figure out."

JOHN HOWARD WENT home on a Friday afternoon, mind clicking away on the myriad problems the Bungie team had to solve. The following morning, he woke up early and went to a 24-hour around the corner from his apartment. After breakfast and several cups of coffee, he broke out a notepad and pencils, lit his first cigarette, and doodled.

Converting Crimson Skies from a pen-and-paper game to a computer game had taught him invaluable lessons. One was the importance of nailing the feeling of movement. Crimson Skies was an arcade-style shooter, more concerned with gunfire and explosions than realistic physics. Players still expected to feel like they were flying, but the FASA team had discovered ways to cheat.

"If you are flying toward the ground, we will overdrive the effectiveness of your control surfaces," explains Howard. "Once you get parallel to the ground, we'll overdrive your thrust. So you can dive at the ground at a million miles per hour, then pull up at the last second and go, 'AAAH!' and it feels amazing. My lesson was taking the DNA of that and putting it into Halo."

Howard knew just where to embed that DNA. Many players believed that the feedback from firing guns comprised the heart of any first-person shooter. To Howard, that was secondary to aiming. That was easy to do on PC, since players could slide their mouse to aim at any pixel at the screen. On a controller that would use twin joysticks, movement would be less precise. Those sticks would really only have three or four positions: neutral, tilted a little, tilted more, tilted all the way. He needed to devise precise, fine aiming, plus the ability to turn around and open fire on players who sneaked up on them from behind.

It all came down to the dot, he realized. Visible or not, shooters on the PC directed bullets or projectiles from players' weapons to a location on the screen pointed to by a dot, or reticle. Bungie could cheat by changing that dot into a larger shape. Howard decided on a horseshoe-like pattern. Any projectiles or bullets that connected with solid objects in that pattern would count as a hit--not 100 percent accurate, but close enough.

Excited, he drew faster. Not every gun was created equal, so why should every gun have the same shape? The sniper rifle should have a narrower shape, or pattern of dots, since that weapon rewarded accuracy by inflicting major damage on targets, whereas the shotgun, which fired in a spread, should have a wider, more circular pattern.

Howard returned to the office that Monday and sat down with Charlie Gough, one of Bungie's programmers. "I've got some ideas for this. Let's start prototyping stuff."

Gough leafed through Howard's notepad, nodding at images that seemed viable. "He said, that one's the aim acceleration thing where you're on a nonlinear curve as soon as you peg the stick," Howard remembers. "That's good; let's do that. The open reticle is good, let's do that. There'll be a true sight down the middle of the reticle and we'll have bullet spread from there."

Aim acceleration refers to how the movement of the input device--in Halo's case, the Xbox controller's thumbsticks--translates into adjustments to the player's view. The longer players peg their stick, or hold it in one direction as far as the stick will go, the faster their avatar rotates. Aim acceleration kicks in any time players turn, not just when they have an enemy in their sights, and the rate of acceleration may change depending on their weapon of choice, another variable for Bungie's team to determine.

Howard compared the way he envisioned the reticle moving over a target to running sandpaper over a bumpy surface. "As the reticle moves over a target, the speed ramps down. As you're on a target, now you have more sensitivity with the stick. He said that was good."

Programmer Matt Segur proposed another idea: Magnetism, or how far a bullet "bends" to hit an enemy. Rather than flying in a straight line, Halo's projectiles would curve slightly to hit targets. Another mechanic, snapping, or aim assist, moves players' reticles closer to their targets.

Over the summer and fall of 2000, Halo's control scheme went from a jumble of increasingly opaque questions to a system that would define first-person shooters on consoles for the next 19 years and counting. Moving the left thumbstick moved players forward or backward and caused them to sidestep. The right stick played the part of the PC's mouse, giving them the freedom to look and aim anywhere.

"The aim acceleration thing, the open reticle thing, the sandpaper thing, the magnetism thing, let's put all those together, expose some of the values, and tune it," Howard says. "It worked almost from the beginning. This is an overly complimentary analogy, but it's like when you hear song writers say, 'That song just kind of came to me.' It kind of wrote itself. The interesting part to me was we tried it, it worked, we tuned it a little bit, and then we never really jerked with it."

DEFINING CONTROLS WAS the first step. The next was making sure players understood those controls. Most PC games, particularly shooters, let players redefine, or remap, their controls as they saw fit. Console games restrict customization for one key reason. On a PC, developers can't predict what input method players will use. They can assume mouse and keyboard, since those peripherals became standardized with Windows and graphical user interfaces (GUIs). Even then, developers argue that any two players may place their hands at different positions on the keyboard.

Bungie got ahead of that rationale by designing Halo's first map to teach players how to hold their controller and how to use it optimally. The game begins with Master Chief, the player-character, awakening from cryo-sleep. Just ahead, two engineers ease players into the game world and the control scheme by couching instructions in narrative text.

TECH 1:

Tube shows green. Cycle complete.

TECH 2:

Sorry for the quick thaw, Master Chief. Things are a little hectic right now. The disorientation should pass quickly.

TECH 1:

Welcome back, Sir. We'll have you battle-ready stat.

TECH 2:

Chief, please look around the room. I need to get a calibration reading for your suit's diagnostics.

"I was like, how can I do this in fiction? How can we do this right?" Howard recalls. "At the same time, Joe Staten, who was leading the cinematics team, was sharing some of the storyboards. He said, 'Okay, so the Master Chief wakes up from cryosleep.' I was thinking about that, like, Well, he's half cyborg. Wouldn't we have to do all these system tests? Once I had that concept, I had a frame to put that in. There's a reason for a tech to say, 'Press this button and see if it works.'"

After asking players to look around, Halo waits for player input. At this stage, players will fiddle with their controllers, and their actions will funnel into one of two outcomes. Either they'll tilt the right stick up, or, if they're accustomed to inverted controls used in flight games like Microsoft Flight Simulator and Crimson Skies, they'll tilt it down. Either way, the camera pans up. Tech 2 will speak up again and ask players, in narrative-speak, if they're comfortable with the choice they made.

"The guy says, 'Okay, I've inverted the circuit. Try it again. Which of those feels right?'" Howard continues. "Once people try one, they know, 'That's how my brain's wired.'"

Players can change their control scheme from regular to inverted or back again in options menus during play, but weaving it into Halo's story allowed players to immerse themselves in the experience without a fourth-wall-breaking tutorial booting them back into the real world.

Calibration was not a part of Halo's original design. When the game reached a playable state that Bungie felt comfortable showing it to others, the team sent it to Microsoft's user research lab and asked them to run blind tests on players. "The number of people we tested who played with look inversion on or off was about 50/50," Howard says. "We couldn't pick a default," so players make the choice themselves.

Originally, the tutorial sequence went longer. Developers complained that it was taking too long to get to the action, so the designers and Joe Staten, Bungie's cinematics director who storyboarded the game's sequences, cut the material and thrust players directly into an attack by the Covenant, a race of aliens that have breached the ship. The marines aren't worried, though. They've got Master Chief on their side. "That raises the stakes," Howard explains, "because you'll think, Wait--I was supposed to do more training! I'm not trained, but everyone's talking to me like I'm the expert. Oh, shit. I better live up to this!"

Microsoft's usability labs proved instrumental once again. Bill Fulton, who managed the labs, set up testing where he, his fellow researchers, their friends and family, and players put the next sequence through its paces. With the ship under attack, players run from corridor to corridor, taking orders from Cortana, their AI companion. While testers played Halo, Howard and a few designers from Bungie watched live feeds from an array of monitors in an adjacent room. One feed showed them what players saw in-game. Another feed came from a camera aimed at players' hands so the designers could see how they manipulated their controllers, and a third, aimed at their face, allowed them to study players' expressions.

As tests continued, Howard and the designers grew concerned. Players rested their left hand on the left thumbstick but positioned their right hand over the controller's buttons. When they reached a junction in a corridor, they lifted their right hand, maneuvered the right stick to turn, then put their right hand back on the buttons. "It was this weird process of running down the hallway, stop, lateral turn, like a robot," says Howard.

Fulton wasn't surprised. A long-time player, he knew for a fact that shooters on consoles were inferior to shooters on PC. As soon as Bungie moved to Microsoft, he went into their building and asked one of the designers, "How are you going to pull off the controller?" Howard and Jason Jones had some ideas but admitted they were still working out kinks. Their plan was to treat the left and right thumbsticks like a keyboard and mouse, respectively.

Fulton reported to his colleagues in the research department that Bungie planned to make the controls PC-like. Intrigued by the notion, Keith Steury, the researcher assigned to work with Bungie on Halo, dug through their archive of video games to find out if other console shooters had attempted what Bungie wanted to do. He found only one, a PlayStation 2 game called TimeSplitters. One of the game's configurations functioned similarly.

Steury returned to the lab and set up a simulation that mapped TimeSplitters' controls to Halo. Bungie designer Jamie Griesemer sat with Steury and monitored how players adapted to situations where they had to turn, circle around enemies, and perform other techniques. "Move to the left and shoot, circle around and shoot, move upstairs and shoot, circle around and shoot, shoot targets at an angle, shoot targets diagonally, shoot targets straight up or straight down--that kind of thing," Fulton explains. "That was how the control system for Halo came about, which is now basically the standard for all console shooters. It was John Howard, Jaime Griesemer, and Keith."

Tests in the lab also helped Bungie develop the game's aim assist, a feature that guides players' crosshairs toward opponents. Aim assist has garnered a reputation as an unfair handicap. PC players deride console players for playing games that help them snap to their targets, whereas on the PC, players have to line up their shots just so and can take credit for each of their kills, or frags.

"There's an art there," Fulton says. "If you do this too much, it feels bad. You have to keep it within the boundaries of, 'I did it right and succeeded, but I could have done it wrong and failed.' Now, you can fake it, but people pick up on that. They're smart."

Since the advent of moving in three dimensions, developers had struggled with systems that would help players aim more accurately. Nintendo's The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time on the N64 is credited with popularizing a targeting system that locks on to an enemy. But that wouldn't do for a first-person shooter where part of the fun was aiming better and faster. "That's one way, but it doesn't feel like you're shooting somebody," Fulton says of lock-on targeting. "It feels like picking the right target. The goal was to make people feel good because they shot well. If you made aim assist too strong, you robbed people of that sense of mastery and skill. If you made it too weak, they felt stupid."

Over time, Halo's aim assist developed into a combination of aim acceleration, aim assist, and player reactions that felt natural, accurate, and true--no cheating asked for or required.

"All we did was say, 'When your brain attempts to do certain things, your thumbs can't do them the way you imagine. We need the algorithm that processes the controls to say, if your thumbs do this, given what is happening on the screen, I think you're trying to do that,'" Fulton says. "Like, I think you're trying to circle-strafe; I think you're trying to acquire a target. You have to get to where you know that what you did led to the right outcome. You know how to do even better next time. A really good Halo player is better than a not-as-good player by a wide margin. Skill is a factor, but we made it so skill is possible as opposed to random."

STEURY'S INVESTIGATION INTO CONTROL SCHEMES similar to the one Bungie wanted to implement for Halo was timely. Xbox hardware was still in flux, and there was no timetable on when the controller would be ready. "We didn't get our hands on Duke controllers until near the end. Those things were like gold: You could barely get your hands on one of them," says Bill Fulton.

Until then, they used a PC gamepad called the Hammerhead. Sporting eight buttons and two thumbsticks parallel to one another on either side of the controller, it resembled Sony's DualShock 2 pad for the PS2. "The Xbox and games groups were separate," Fulton adds. "We were told we could not contact them, not even to ask them questions. You can only get what they give to everyone. So we had these controllers that every developer got, that did not resemble the Duke that closely."

Instead of Xbox consoles, Bungie and other developers making games for the console worked on PCs with specs that Microsoft assured them were similar to what the Xbox would run under its hood. "We were running off these Apple towers, which I always thought was crazy," says Chris Carney, an environment artist at Bungie. "Here I am working at Microsoft, and on day one, everyone has Apple towers under their desks."

Uncertainty surrounding the controller, the device that would serve as an extension of the player's body, complicated the process of fine-tuning Halo's controls. "They needed to have the controls feel like they played well, accurately, and smoothly such that they eliminated the shooter skepticism," says Stuart Moulder, program manager within Microsoft Game Studio. "There were all these other aspects to the game, but that one thing? If they hadn't done that, they would have failed. Technology, storyline—none of that mattered."

Working with the resources he had at his disposal, Howard came up with a hypothesis he hoped would teach players how to move more fluidly in Halo regardless of specifics such as the controller's final form. The more often players had to control the right stick to turn, the less they would feel inclined to take their hand off that stick. Eventually, they would reach a point where they felt comfortable keeping each hand on its corresponding thumbstick; their index fingers could rest on the left and right bumpers. When they needed to jump, crouch, or swing their weapon in a melee attack, they could lift their right hand, press a button with their thumb, and immediately return their hand to the stick.

The ship's narrow corridors played a part, too. Little room to run around meant enemies ran right at them. Players wouldn't need to aim much until the next level, Silent Cartographer, which dropped them on a beach and gave them their first view of Halo's sprawling, open environments. By then, they would feel comfortable manipulating the sticks, and could begin learning more advanced techniques, like how to deal with enemies coming at them from all sides, and driving the Warthog, a turret-mounted jeep that became the franchise's signature vehicle.

"All of that was us trying to figure out, how do we make it so you're ready to be in combat?" Howard adds. "It was a process of coming up with the aiming system, building the first level to get you to put your thumb on the right stick. Then you get to the second level and once you're in the Warthog, you're off to the races."

Halo's difficulty modes feed into the first level's tutorial-like segments. Bungie assumed that players would select easy or normal difficulty for their first run. More advanced players would choose tougher difficulties such as Legendary, designed under the assumption that players had already finished the story at least once and were ready for a challenge. On Normal, the designers removed all grenades from the first level, sensing that players might find grenades helpful, but were likely to blow themselves up as they learned the controls and grow frustrated.

In the last months of development, developers received finished development kits that resembled the retail Xbox's form factor, and got their hands on the enormous "Duke" controller. While opinions on its size were divisive, developers almost unanimously agreed that the asymmetrical placement of its thumbsticks, with the left higher and catty-corner to the right, felt natural and comfortable.

"I loved them," Fulton says. "We believed the sticks would be more important to movement than buttons. Left hand is just stick, but where's the best place for the stick? They picked a really good location, whereas on PlayStation, the buttons were in the primary positions on the original controller. Sony put the sticks where they could find space for them. I thought the stick placement on the Duke was a really good choice."

"To me, it feels right," Howard adds, who admits the size of the Duke never bothered him. "It just feels ergonomically correct. I'm six-two, a big guy. The size of the controller never bugged me. It never even occurred to me that it was weird until people complained about it. I was like, 'It's a controller.' I feel like the Dreamcast had a big, weird, janky controller. I thought that was pretty weird, but whatever, it seemed fine."

Critics and players never reached a consensus on the Duke, although most believed it was too big and wrote it off as a failed experiment. Meanwhile, Halo's controls became the gold standard for first-person shooters on console.

"What I found interesting was the year after that, we were demoing Mech Assault, a FASA game," recalls Howard. "I would go to people and say, 'Have you played Halo?' They'd say, 'Oh, yeah.' I'd say, 'Just like Halo. This button's missiles, this button's lasers.' I would say, 'Aim at that building.' They'd aim at the building and blow a hole in it. I'd say, 'You're good,' and then go to the next person."