Halo Co-Creator Talks About Canceled Game With Lord Of The Rings Director Peter Jackson

Halo co-creator Marcus Lehto has shared some new insight into Halo: Chronicles, which was apparently the name for the Halo game that Bungie was collaborating on with The Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson. Speaking to HiddenXperia, Lehto started off by clarifying that he did not personally get to visit Jackson at his home in New Zealand for the meeting.

Instead, Joseph Staten and Harold Ryan of Bungie took the trip and spoke with Jackson about a potential collaboration. From what Lehto shared, it sounds like the partnership didn't get very far off the ground. He said Bungie and Jackson's team were "trying to figure out what kind of collaboration we could cook up" with the acclaimed filmmaker.

"Because we were just so excited about the idea of working with Peter Jackson. We had a great deal of respect for him and what he had done with The Lord of the Rings. We felt like it would have been a natural fit. It could have been something we would have been really impressed by. But sadly, that kind of just petered away, no pun intended. I wish we would have seen something come from that, really, I do," he said.

Halo Chronicles was announced at Microsoft's X06 event back in 2006. Jackson himself appeared on stage in Barcelona where he announced a new project that had been in the works for about a year. He said it was "not quite a game, not quite a film" experience.

"Instead of making a film, we [will] make a form of entertainment that you can watch and enjoy like you would a film," but with interactive elements, Jackson said in 2006. "I think we're on a threshold of a new way to tell stories. With that in mind, we discussed a way to do it, and with that in mind, we decided that the first title should be something that will allow us to not have to devise a whole new world but to allow us to tell the story."

At the time, Jackson's Wingnut Films production studio was planning to shoot a Halo movie, but after that fell apart, director Neil Blomkamp and Jackson went on to make District 9 instead.

Microsoft did take a stab at the "not quite a game, not quite a film" experience with Quantum Break, a game that featured a live-action TV element as well (featuring none other than The Lord of the Rings actor Dominic Monaghan). This was at the time when Microsoft was trying to start its own film and TV division with Xbox Entertainment Studios, but this was closed in 2014.

In other news, Lehto recently discussed how he felt worried about Halo Infinite until recently. Soon more people will get to try the game, as a multiplayer beta is apparently coming up soon.