Kids today will never understand how much Halo 3 meant to millennials of a certain age. It was one of those rare occasions where a long-awaited game met the hype, but it also arrived at the perfect time, as broadband networks were expanding across the country, and many of us entered the arena of online multiplayer for the first time. I must’ve sunk thousands of hours into it—and even today, I’m learning things about the game. Like how the Mongoose ATV’s exhaust note was the combination of a scooter and a Pontiac Fiero.
If you’re a Halo nerd, you probably already know this. It was a detail shared in the “Making of” film that shipped with collector’s editions of the game way back in 2007. Looking back, the UNSC vehicles in Halo always sounded detailed and guttural in a way you rarely heard back then, even in racing games. (Don’t get me started on Gran Turismo’s vacuum cleaners.) In the documentary, Jay Weinland, the game’s Audio Lead, explains that the Mongoose’s particular growl is a combination of a Vespa he owned with an aftermarket muffler and a colleague’s Fiero fitted with dual, six-inch pipes. You can hear it in the embedded video below at 50:22.
The way Bungie captured that exhaust note isn’t really different from how it’d be done today. You can see a microphone mounted to the edge of the sports car’s rear deck, pointed down. It’s pretty amusing seeing a random Fiero rigged up in such a way rather than, say, a sparkling new hot hatch. But gritty sources of sound make for a suitably gritty result.
“As I jump in [the Mongoose], you can hear the growl of the two-stroke,” Weinland explains in the video. “And then you’ve got this really growly, you know, four-stroke—huge-sounding exhaust.” As Master Chief sets off, the sounds blend.
Those weren’t the only vehicles recorded for Halo 3. Another engineer captured the hydraulic hiss of his Subaru wagon’s tailgate opening, then morphed that into the whoosh that the automatic doors make in the game. Who knows what other sounds were created using cars? All of the discussion around audio capture in the film is actually very interesting, because it reinforces how designers hear the essence of a potentially good clip in everyday life, record it, and then tune it in post to make it fit in the game world. Who wants to guess where the Ghost’s sound came from? No Googling.
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