Master Chief actor Steve Downes pushed back against Halo 5's infamous misleading marketing

Master Chief's voice actor shares a rare behind-the-scenes story about Halo 5, acknowledging the controversy around the game's bait-and-switch advertising while saying he actually pushed back against some of the decisions that were made.

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Photo credit: Reddit

Halo 5 has gone down in history as having one of the most misleading advertisement campaigns of all time, but things might have been even more confusing if Master Chief actor Steve Downes hadn't expressed his thoughts while recording.

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In a new video celebrating 25 years of the Halo franchise, Downes answers fan questions for a good 38 minutes, and one of them was about the different promos like the misleading Hunt the Truth campaign that were used to advertise the game in the Xbox One's earlier days.

"When I was doing sessions for the game, we also did separate sessions which ended up being promos and trailers to promote Halo 5. As many of you know, those stories, those trailers sort of led you to believe one thing when in fact it was another thing in the actual game," Downes said, articulating fan sentiment at the time--feelings that have carried over to the modern day.

That's not to say that Downes was gruff or rude about his dissatisfaction; the voice actor describes having to professionally navigate the delicate balancing act between performance and direction. Downes expressed himself along the way, and his influence may have shaped Halo 5's ads to help make them more grounded to the actual content of the game.

"I sort of kind of knew that while we were doing it, and felt that perhaps the Chief was being pushed in a direction that I didn't feel was particularly right. So trying to find that, trying to keep the director happy but also be true to the character, became a little more of a challenge than what I was used to."

Master Chief simply wasn't acting like the character that we've known for decades, likely because of the creative hand-off between Bungie, who focused Halo as a trilogy based on 1980s and 1990s action movies, and 343 Industries, who wanted to take Halo in a more dramatic sci-fi direction.

Chief was getting to a place where he wasn't being...Chiefy.

"I remember as we were recording, I thought, 'okay, somehow I've amped this up beyond the parameters of where Master Chief would be. We stopped in the middle of the recording, and we all agreed that we needed to go back and revisit that.

"These are things that happen, they probably happen at every session at some point, and there's a certain amount of trust that has to be there between the actor, the director, and the writer. You all sort of have to work together to find the essence of who these characters are and what the story is."

Downes also says that this kind of tension wasn't there when he recorded lines for the new Halo Campaign Evolved remake that's coming out this year (to PlayStation for the first time, I might add).

"I really felt that we had that [trust] very strongly with the remake of the first game, Campaign Evolved."