Halo 3 Book Views

General Goods

Like many projects at Bungie, Jason Jones’ Halo 2-related quip about building a cathedral in a hurricane continues to ring true. The latest construct built amidst the swirling winds is an art book, The Art of Halo 3, which releases Nov. 25th at fine retailers everywhere. Studio veteran and resident “Pixelsmith” Lorraine McLees wrangled a team of Bungie folks, and worked hand-in-hand with the book’s publisher, Prima Games, and Microsoft Game Studios to help set The Art of Halo 3 atop coffee tables everywhere.

In May of 2008, the preproduction process of collecting and organizing the more than one-thousand potential images that would be used to comprise the finished pages of The Art of Halo 3 had begun. All tallied, nearly five Gigabytes of digital assets were collected from various studio repositories and marked as art book potentials—conceptualizations that had been utilized and then stored away as Halo 3 moved inexorably along the iterative path of the design process.

A collection of Halo stories, Halo: Evolutions, was simultaneously released in print and audiobook formats in November 2009. Evolutions includes original material by Nylund, Buckell, Karen Traviss and contributions from Bungie.[102] Science fiction author Greg Bear has been contracted to write a trilogy of books focusing on the Forerunners titled Halo: Cryptum, with the first volume to appear in 2011,[103] while Traviss is writing a series of novels taking place after the events of Halo 3.[104] Tor is also rereleasing the first three Halo novels with new content and cover art.[105]

Like the previous art book, The Art of Halo 3 focuses on the artistic development aspects of Halo 3.[1] The Art of Halo 3 provides an inside look behind ideas that changed over time. Like the previous Art of Halo, ideas are shown as they evolved, from a series of sketches to storyboards, to their eventual final look. The book includes a wide variety of art seen during the Halo 3 marketing campaign, along with an inside look at vehicles, characters, environments concepts and items cut from the final game.