INDIANAPOLIS — More than 20 years ago, the first "Halo" video game debuted on Xbox and has since launched a dozen sequel games, novels and a television series.
In the Paramount+ sci-fi drama, the galaxy is on the brink of destruction, so Master Chief Petty Officer John-117 (Emmy-nominated actor Pablo Schreiber) leads his teams against an alien threat known as the Covenant.
"At the end of the first season, he had surrendered his consciousness to Cortana (Jen Taylor) and let her take over his body to get him out of a jam," Schreiber said. "Bit of a time-cut coming back to the second season. She's now been taken away from him, and he doesn't know why. He and the rest of his team are relegated to a distant planet, doing a job that they feel they are overqualified for. Everybody's grumpy, everybody's upset. The threat of the Covenant is getting very real, and the war is not going well for humanity."
When the first season debuted in 2021, it arguably paved the way for additional video games to be adapted into television shows, like "The Last of Us" on HBO, "Twisted Metal" on Peacock and the upcoming "Fallout" on Prime Video.
"What you get from adapting a video game that has such a massive audience is you get a big built-in audience, millions and millions of fans who have played the game. What you also get with that is millions and millions of people who have their own take on how they feel the show should be made — for good reason," Schreiber said. "The way video game characters are created, aspects of their personality are held back. They're created as blank slates so that we fill in the character with our own personality traits."
And Schreiber combined his past experiences with new opportunities when crafting this character.
"I played a little bit. I didn't grow up with a gaming system, so all my gaming experience was when I would go to friends' houses," Schreiber said. "I was lucky enough to go to Seattle, the 343 where they make the game, and went through a very intensive deep-dive into the 'Halo' lore, and I just fell in love with the storytelling, with how deep and how intricate the universe had been plotted out already and how much opportunity there was for amazing storytelling in that world."
New episodes of "Halo" begin streaming Thursday, Feb. 8 on Paramount+.