If you've been following the many interviews 343 Industries has been doing surrounding the release of Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary, you might have seen a mention of a company called Starlight Runner Entertainment. The New York–based Starlight Runner specializes in what's called "transmedia," or branching fiction into other media platforms. If it's a videogame franchise, for instance, the process could involve taking the game's world and preparing it for expansion into novels, comic books, TV series, movies, etc.

Starlight Runner's work has been felt in popular franchises such as TRON, Red Faction, Pirates of the Caribbean, Prince of Persia, Transformers, and Avatar, but President and CEO Jeff Gomez calls its undertaking of Halo, which spanned about a year-and-a-half of the company's time, one of its proudest moments. 

"It was the biggest and most challenging work of our entire careers," he says.

Almost a year before 2009's Halo Wars was released, Starlight Runner began assembling what Gomez referred to as "the Halo Bible." The resource accounted for the totality of the Halo universe, ensured continuity between the franchise's branching fiction, helped define canon, and basically created a comprehensive reference guide for anyone jumping into the world, Gomez says.

We caught up with Gomez to talk about Starlight Runner's work with Halo and the broader scope of transmedia while he was in San Francisco speaking at the Storyworld conference in November. Gomez wanted to stay short on specifics concerning the Halo Bible. In 2010, though, Bloomberg Businessweek ran an article that contained details of the "Halo Story Bible" that described it as a black-and-silver looseleaf binder with hundreds of pages that is kept in a locked metal cabinet in 343's offices. With only four Halo Bibles in existence, Bloomberg reported that authors working on Halo novels are given just the portions of the Halo Bible that are applicable to what they're writing about, and writer Greg Bear mentioned that each page he received had a unique code on it that could be tracked back to him. 

Following our interview with Gomez (pictured below), we reached out to 343 Industries for official comment, and will update this post should we receive it.    

OXM: What parts of the Halo universe did you work with?
JG: “Microsoft approached us about examining the Halo universe in its entirety. That’s more than a 100,000 years of continuity and Bungie was thorough. Our job was to examine all of this content, clean it up, make it coherent and understandable to the stakeholders — the people who are involved in making future games and marketing.”

OXM: What’s some of the stuff Starlight Runner did for Halo that fans might be familiar with?
JG: “The conversation we had with, I don’t think they were called 343 (Industries) yet, but the conversation we had with the team was about the power of story. And how something so successful as Halo on one particular media platform, its story was the link that would make it powerful on all media platforms. So there was a lot of conversation about story and character. About strengthening the characters, making them more persistent. We often advise our videogame clients to try to refrain from killing every single supporting character — you’d be shocked how often that happens — and to see Halo on a truly epic scale. Halo is an epic, in the traditional sense of epic poetry. Halo was born in 2001. It is the odyssey of a man who is dealing with religious extremism. It is a cosmic journey that needed to go somewhere that is going to be resonant with who we are as a people in the next several years. And I’m deeply satisfied with how Microsoft executed on that, particularly with Reach.”

OXM: It sounded like it was almost a consulting job?
JG: “[343] and [Halo Franchise Development Director] Frank O'Connor have talked several times about the Halo mythology and the "super bible" we assembled for them, which contains, up until the point that we finished, the totality of the canonical Halo universe. And what’s beautiful about the Halo universe is that you don’t necessarily need Master Chief to tell a good Halo story. And I think that Microsoft has come to understand that. But we love Master Chief.”

OXM: So you guys assembled this Halo Bible. Talk about that.
JG: “Well, I have to emphasize that there was a lot to draw upon. Bungie had generated an enormous amount of content, Microsoft has a lot, and that there was a lot out there, in terms of the novels and that kind of thing. And what we determined what was canonical and what wasn’t, we can’t get into, but in general, Starlight Runner loves to create truly total mythologies. Our mythologies can range between 300 pages and thousands of pages.”

OXM: So where would we have seen some of the influence from the Bible?
JG: “I think that it’s fair to say that Microsoft uses the Halo mythology as a resource, and has used it as a resource, for quite some time.”

OXM: With Halo, when you guys started sifting through all the information, what was some of the stuff you knew you had to go through and material you decided not to? There’s TV shows, the novels...was there an area where you drew the line?
JG: “When we have a property that has the kind of richness and following of Halo, we go through everything. We watched all the Red Vs. Blue. Everything. We watch fan films, user-generated content, music videos, commercials that Microsoft did for Halo. When you fall in love, you want to know everything. And that’s what we did.”

OXM: And how many pages is the Halo Bible, about?
JG: “It is one of the biggest we’ve ever worked on.”