An "I rememer" on Fictional Worlds

I remember my first real exposure to Star Wars when I was eight years old. Of course, I had known about Yoda, Darth Vader, and the Force from general media, but I had never seen any real Star Wars media before. That’s when Star Wars: The Clone Wars, the animated TV show, started airing on Cartoon Network. I was completely absorbed by the more mature (or at least more mature than I was used to at the time) nature of the story I was being presented. At its core, the Clone Wars TV show was a war story after all, focusing more on the troops, the clones, than just the adventures of the Jedi. It didn’t make me long after getting into the show for me to watch the movies for the first time, an experience my dad was happy to accompany me on. Then after that I began getting into the games and spending hours of my life reading about the expanded universe or, as it’s called now, Star Wars Legends. These days I still consider myself an avid fan of Star Wars, even if I don’t particularly like the new movies being made by Disney. Star Wars has just been such a significant part of my life and I can honestly say that I don’t think I would be the person I am today without it.

Thinking about Star Wars like that made me wonder if anything else had such an impact on my life and there is one thing that came to mind pretty quickly. The Halo series. Similarly to Star Wars, it’s a science fiction war story. It focuses mainly on one character though, unlike Star Wars. The main character of the Halo series, Master Chief, is a super soldier known as a Spartan that is used by humanity as kind of a “last hope” against the massive alien armies of the Covenant. The Halo series, or more accurately, Halo Reach, is the first game that I got into the multiplayer side of. To this day, despite how some people feel about Halo Reach, it is my personal favorite of the Halo franchise. It’s ironic because unlike most of the Halo games, Reach doesn’t actually feature Master Chief as the main character but rather a Spartan called Noble Six. While the multiplayer of Reach was important to me, I feel like I have to mention the impact the story had on me. In Reach, you play as the sixth member of a team of Spartans called Noble team and as you play through the game you watch your teammates get killed off one by one as the Covenant conquers the planet of Reach. The story concludes with you, the last remaining member of Noble team having just secured the off-world transport of a key item for winning the war at the cost of your own ticket off the planet. Unlike most stories where you, the main character, die in some cutscene or the game just fades to black, Reach lets you play through your final moments as your position is overrun by endless hordes of aliens. You can fight them off as long as you manage, but eventually you will be overrun and killed, all the while a singular mission objective displayed at the top of your screen is haunting you: “Survive”. This story just meant a lot to me growing up, and the fact that the game also had a multiplayer side was a big part of that too.

While I was in middle school I would always hop online and play Halo Reach’s multiplayer after school. It was there that I met friends that would end up being some of my closest for the next few years. Playing with friends against other players or playing through the story of the game with them fulfilled a basic social need that I had trouble fulfilling in real life during those years. Again, I would not be the man I am today without this game series. Although Halo does have a bit of an expanded universe, it isn’t as large as Star Wars’ and I never really got into it, but it still is a series I hold dear to me nonetheless. I just feel like I can get absorbed into universe that Halo creates. The history of the Spartan program, the Covenant and their structure and seeing how they assimilated so many alien races into their ranks, the ancient alien civilization that wiped themselves out using the Halo rings for which the series is named after, and so much more are all things that make me want to know more. I think it speaks to the beauty of fictional worlds that people can want to study and learn about them and their history just like people do about our own world.