In the 51st minute of Halo – a military space-opera that’s among the first shows on new streaming service Paramount+, with a one-episode taster on Channel 5 – Pablo Schreiber takes his helmet off. His character, disaffected soldier Master Chief Petty Officer John-117, lets the scared and angry girl he’s chaperoning see his strong face and sad eyes. It is the show’s first convincing human interaction – before then, we’ve been playing games.
Halo was the video game that, when it debuted in 2001, perfected the first-person shooter genre – where you see through the eyes of the character you’re controlling as they fire at baddies. It made the launch of the Xbox console a hit for Microsoft, and helped introduce grand narratives to games, basing its bullet-fests on a mythology about a battle centuries from now between the United Nations Space Command and an alien theocracy called the Covenant.
