I have heard that the First Person Shooter Halo game franchise was inspired by Larry Niven's Ringworld. How Ringworldy is it? Is there more to the connection between Niven's classic Ringworld and the popular space FPS game than just their Ring/Halo shapes? If so, what nods to Larry Nivens classic Ringworld book series are depicted in the Halo game franchise prior to the release of Halo 4??
asked Nov 7, 2012 at 22:34
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4Long story short - The titular halo is simply a smaller ringworld, combined with the death star. The influence is mostly a similar scale and world-building. Also the ringworld universe aliens were pretty diverse, and the covenant is made up of a diverse group of aliens.– Mark RogersCommented Nov 7, 2012 at 22:40
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@Mark Halo is much advanced than Death Star. It doesn't just act on one planet. It knocks out all sentient life from 25000 light year radius. Interestingly, only sentient life unlike Death Star.– Dr. DoomCommented Nov 8, 2012 at 12:11
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@SachinShekhar - Fair enough, I was just kind of generalizing.– Mark RogersCommented Nov 8, 2012 at 15:08
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During this last week on the TV quiz show Jeopardy! this premise was the correct answer to one question.– Peter MCommented Apr 1, 2018 at 12:18
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4 Answers
This Bungie web page offers a quote from Nathan Bitner, one of Halo's early developers, which provides one answer:
It's worth noting that though Halo takes place on a ring-shaped artificial world, the story, characters and world bear no relation whatsoever to Niven's excellent Ringworld novels.
Still, we can at least look at the similarities between the Halo and Known Space universes and draw our own conclusions.
Beyond the obvious similarity of habitable large scale ring-shaped structures, there is also the backstory conflict between the Forerunners and the Flood, which is similar in flavor and resolution to the Slaver-tnuctipun conflict in Niven's Known Space universe.
The Flood parasitized sentient life. The tnuctipun were master geneticists who created life forms that were presented to the Slavers as gifts which later turned out to be weapons.
The Forerunners developed the Halo array to wipe out all sentient life in the galaxy. This would deprive the Flood parasites of new hosts and wipe them out. The Forerunners activated the weapon and vanished. Plagued by the tnuctipun bioweapons, some of which were intelligent species in their own right, the Slavers had a slave race create an amplifier for their psi-talent. The Slavers then broadcast a suicide command to the whole galaxy. Everything intelligent enough to understand the command obeyed and died, including the Slavers themselves.
In both universes this galaxy-wide extinction event wiped the slate clean, giving time and space for sentient life to evolve again over billions of years. Eventually these new beings would become spacefaring and begin to stumble over the abandoned ancient and deadly technologies of the old conflict. In the Halo universe, humans find the old Halo weapons and inadvertently unleash the Flood. In Known Space, humans and other species seek out Slaver stasis boxes and unleash many dangerous things, including dormant Slavers, tnuctipun, and the Slavers' suicide weapon.
The backstories are similar in broad strokes, but the Halo gameplay diverges wildly from anything depicted into Known Space literature. I think there is enough here to suggest Known Space influence in the setup of the Halo saga, but nothing beyond that.
answered Nov 10, 2012 at 4:53
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1+1 | I totally agree with your assessment. Broad strokes, big-damn objects but beyond that, stylistically very different. Keep up the good work, sir. Commented Jun 30, 2013 at 23:08
Actually there are a few specific similarities between the Halo structure and the Ringworld in Larry Niven's Ringworld series. One that struck out to me is the inclusion of a 'Map Room', which features prominently in the first Halo film and the second and third Ringworld books.
Structure - indeed. Forerunners etc more taken from P.Anthony's Cluster series. The troopers are more Starship Troopers with some 40k Ultramarine... lots of cross- pollination.
The Sangheili and Kzinti are also pretty similar, and the Prophets/Puppeteers kind of are, tho it's a stretch. Also John is the "luckiest spartan", which sounds familiar.
