When “Birth of a Spartan” debuted on XBox Live recently, we enjoyed the quality of the short film. Much like the live-action videos for Halo 3, the Halo: Reach promotional clip had Hollywood-level art direction and production, leaving us wondering why they never went through with the Blomkamp Halo film.
Microsoft recently passed along the Youtube video link to us, and we can’t help but think that there will be subsequent clips in the series. Is this something that Halo fans have come to expect? Live action shorts preceding the launch of the next game in the series? Is this a valid way to build hype for a game, by shooting live-action never in-game videos?
Watching the video, we get the feeling that it sits somewhere in “prequel”-ville, meant to lead us into a character (that may never exist in the actual game) much like car companies do with concept vehicles.
Are live-action videos like concept cars, setting up a game’s intent and theme and serving as an introduction to the product? Or are they simply pure marketing? While more than likely the latter, we can at least agree that the films show the high level of creativity that the Halo teams continue to have as they create their games each time.
*Video sent along to us by M80 on behalf of Microsoft
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