Halo Encyclopedia Releases March 29, 2022 - News

by William D'Angelo , posted on 13 July 2021 / 1,890 Views

343 Industries is set to release Halo Infinite this coming Holiday season, and have now teamed up with Dark Horse Comic to release a new Halo Encyclopedia.

The new Halo Encyclopedia has been written in-house by the 343 Franchise Team of Jeremy Patenaude, Kenneth Peters, and Jeff Easterling. It is nearly 500 pages long, which is more than the 367 pages of the previous Halo Encyclopedia.

The book is full of "lore, details, explanations, clarifications, and maybe even a few revelations." It also features original art from the in-house Concept Art Team at 343. There is also art from artists from Dark Horse Comics. People from the "Sins of the Prophets" project have helped to add additional visual fleet flair.

View the cover below:

Read a message from 343 Franchise Creative Director Frank O’Connor below:

I’ve always been fascinated by encyclopedias. We had the leather-bound Encyclopedia Brittanica to pore through on rainy days – and a big selection of museums on rainy and sunny days. What I realized, even then, is that museums and encyclopedias aren’t memorializations of things past. They are living, evolving, growing things. Those leather-bound tomes were a moment of civilization and culture, trapped in amber. But somewhere, someone was working on the next edition.

We have a Halo museum here at 343 Industries. Really. A proper museum. With display cases, suits of armor, working machines, dioramas. After 20 years of making amazing things – games of course, but also hundreds of brilliant partnerships on toys, books, animation, plush toys, board games, apparel, movie props…. You get the idea – we have to curate all this stuff. To organize and itemize and order it of course, but more importantly, to celebrate it. And that’s what we’re doing here, too.

The Halo Story Bible has taken on near-mythic status, as if, somewhere in the bowels of the 343 ship, there’s a bulging pile of A4 sheets, neatly printed in Courier, and festooned with post-it notes and handwritten citations – that’s sort of true – but the “real” story bible is more of an encyclopedia. And it’s distinctly digital. The franchise team curates, files, describes, defines and delineates everything that we create – and orders it into searchable, editable, browsable articles and images and videos – so that anyone we work with can search, double and gut-check, contribute to, ask questions of, request updates to and just enjoy terabytes of information, imagery and audio from twenty years of curating one of the largest video game universes there is.

So the chance to take some of that information and process, and curate it in a reader-friendly format, to revisit the history and culture of Halo in a dynamic, visual format is a delight for us. It is a vast amount of work. And the effort, imagination, and heart that has been poured into this would make a pretty fascinating exhibit on its own, but it’s also a privilege to share it with you. To show you just some of what’s been built over the first twenty years, even as we set about building the next twenty. We hope you enjoy reading it even a fraction as much as we enjoyed putting it together. Read it the way you want. One page at a time, or let curiosity take you on its own journey.

View some art from the Halo Encyclopedia below:

A life-long and avid gamer, William D'Angelo was first introduced to VGChartz in 2007. After years of supporting the site, he was brought on in 2010 as a junior analyst, working his way up to lead analyst in 2012. He has expanded his involvement in the gaming community by producing content on his own YouTube channel and Twitch channel dedicated to gaming Let's Plays and tutorials. You can contact the author at wdangelo@vgchartz.com or on Twitter @TrunksWD.