I don't have a driver's license. That was my first thought when OXM suggested shipping me off to New Zealand to get behind the wheel of a full-size working replica of Halo’s Warthog, built by Peter Jackson’s Weta Workshop. It’s a really big four-wheel-drive monster with a whopping machine gun on top. And there’s only one of them roaring around on the face of the planet. “I don’t have a license,” I thought. “I can’t drive an automatic, let alone a manual. This is all going to end badly. Oh god.”

Of course, all that was followed pretty quickly by “You mean…I’m actually going to get to drive the Warthog?” And that, in turn, was pretty quickly followed by a grasping of my hand over my mouth, some impressively loud swearing, and the hugging of a cat. There’s really only so long you can actually remain boringly pragmatic when faced with an offer to live out the ultimate fantasy of Halo fans everywhere.

“And really,” I reasoned, “what’s the worst that could happen?” Actually, I already knew the answer to that one, thanks to a YouTube video of Bungie producer Curtis Creamer putting the same vehicle into a wall during Bungie’s trip to New Zealand. I immediately resolved not to follow that little example. I may not be able to drive, but I’m paranoid enough to give walls a very, very wide berth.

Let's Play Dress-Up

And so, I find myself in the back of a cab in Wellington, New Zealand, driving around the town’s amazing coastline on the way to the Workshop. I’ve found that the general public doesn’t really care about or understand nerdy gamer-lust objects, but it’s hard not to gush to my driver about each and every detail of what’s coming up for the day. “I don’t know what that means,” admits the cabbie, frowning politely into the rear-view mirror. “But good luck, really.”

With those best wishes still ringing in my mind, I’m eventually led through the Weta facility, until finally I’m standing inches from the beast itself, accompanied by Weta general manager Tim Launder and the vehicle’s engineer, Peter Osborne. Before I can even think too much about what I’m seeing, though, Launder is attempting to convince me to dress up in the United Nations Space Command Marine armor that was created to complement the vehicle. There’s a brief silence.

Now, don’t get me wrong — it’s not that I’m not aware that pretty much every Halo fan on the face of the planet would kill to be given the same opportunity. It’s just that, sometimes, it’s possible to find yourself a little worried about enthusiastically cosplaying in front of people you’ve just met.

Nevertheless, I’m handed the suit piece by piece, and I slip into it: the pants, the shirt, the shin guards, the thigh guards, the chest plate, the helmet, and so on. Putting aside the fact that I’m still wearing a pair of Converse sneakers, I’m actually starting to feel like this is a character I could really get into. And when one of the Weta team hands me a Battle Rifl e, it really starts to sink in. I realize I’m no Master Chief, but I could probably be the guy who runs into battle beside him before getting gunned down by a Covenant dropship or something.

Auto Erotica

Finally, after posing for a while in a somewhat less than menacing manner, I’m able to focus on the job at hand. And what a job it is: the Warthog is, quite simply, an enormous vehicle. Think SUV-sized, but with an extra foot or so both in width and length, with tusks growing out of its grille. And then put a machine gun on top of it. It’s not hard to see why Covenant Grunts would feel compelled to get the hell out of its way. Standing in front of it, looking up at that chaingun, is a pretty humbling experience.

It’s also astonishingly accurate, from the lights on the dashboard and the markings on the hubcaps, down to the ground-in dirt in the cabin floor and the bullet holes that dot the machine gun’s shielding. And it’d better be accurate — it was initially built with the Halo movie in mind, before the project was shelved by the studios involved.

Fortunately, with the release of Halo 3 came the three Halo: Landfall shorts, directed by Neill Blomkamp. “So the project got resurrected,” says Osborne, sitting proudly in the driver’s seat, “and we got this made. It took about six weeks, basically going from the chassis up to what we have now.” Osborne and Launder managed to avoid putting an exact dollar figure on what they “have now,” but it’s hard not to assume that you could well be talking in the hundreds of thousands, were you to try to put one together yourself. After all, notes Osborne, it’s “a completely scratch-built vehicle.”

The engine is pulled from a popular Australian SUV, the Nissan Patrol, as are the front and rear differentials, which were then custom-cut and widened to actually fit the behemoth. “The motor’s a six-cylinder diesel automatic, full four-wheel drive. Then we stuck a turbo on it,” Osborne says with a grin. “I was pushing for a V8, but I got overruled on that one. They said it might be overkill.”

They were probably right. Even the brief demonstration of the Warthog’s engine while it’s still parked in the Weta Workshop is enough to raise eyebrows — and probably the blood pressure of any nearby Halo fan, too. Not having a driver’s license effectively means I know little to nothing about cars either, but I’ve played enough Need for Speed to know what turbo-charging is all about. It means making it louder, right?

My ignorance notwithstanding, it’s hard not to be absolutely floored by what Osborne and his team have managed to put together. There’s obviously a whole lot of expert technical knowledge put to use in the making of the Warthog that’s sitting in front of me, not to mention a whole lot of care and detail. “[I’m really] into four-wheel driving,” Osborne nods, “so I’m fanatical about the vehicle.”

The Hogfather

One thing Osborne might not be quite so fanatical about, he admits, is Halo. That might seem like a bad thing, but sometimes it takes someone who’s not a fan to be able to look at the little details and make sure the whole project’s not set back by rose-colored glasses. “I played Halo for about 10 minutes and couldn’t get past the first level, then had to get the neighbor’s 8-year-old out to show me how to do it,” Osborne chuckles, clearly a little bashful about the whole admission. “But he got me to the vehicle so I could have a drive around in it, and that was my introduction to Halo.”

“That,” he says, pausing to laugh a little longer, “was the night before the interview for the job to build this thing.”

Clearly, it wasn’t too big an issue: Osborne got the job, and work on the vehicle began in earnest. First, sketches and in-game models were given to the team by Bungie and Microsoft. These weren’t your average pictures from the manual; Osborne notes they were detailed enough that the graphic designers at Weta were able to create concept art for the physical build as well as get the look of the body armor down perfectly. That concept art was then sent back to Bungie and Microsoft, who happily and speedily approved the project. “Then once we got past that stage, it came down to us,” recalls Osborne. “We had a 3D photo of the vehicle, and started from there.”

Building The Perfect Beast

And that meant building it from the ground up. There was an initial plan to use the chassis from a Patrol, but that was quickly rejected in favor of building a custom one to properly fit the wheel base. Piece by piece, the Warthog was welded and screwed together. “Then it was a case of working with the engineers, working on the roll cage and the structure so that if you roll it, it’ll stay intact,” says Osborne.

Then there was the matter of getting the look right. Even after the body armor was in place and the initial paint job was completed, the Warthog still needed to be “aged” so it wouldn’t look too out-of-place in the rough, futuristic battlefield featured in Blomkamp’s shorts. “The newly built vehicle basically looked like something out of a showroom. Then the paint guys got involved and they aged it down,” explains Osborne. “Some of it’s mud. Some of it’s fake blood. But a lot of it is acrylic paint that they spray on, and then they add battle scars. In the shield up here,” he says, pointing to the machine gun, “that’s all done with the aid of a chisel and hammer and blowtorch. It just turns the vehicle from something that looks false to something that’s right out of the game.

“At the same time,” Osborne adds proudly, “we had only six weeks to build the vehicle and get all the builders and the model makers doing the bodywork. But in the end, it all came together.” Even with roughly 20 people working on the vehicle, it was a monumental task — and an impressive achievement.

Suspension of Disbelief

Even the game’s developers were amazed by the end result. “They were blown away,” smiles Osborne. “I don’t think they thought even in their wildest dreams they’d be seeing something from the game that is actually functioning. Certainly, after the release of the shorts — in YouTube comments and forums and things like that — nobody in the world could believe such a thing existed. The photos that were on the website were very clean photos, and a lot of people thought they were fake.”

The proof came in the form of the aforementioned video of the Bungie team checking out the vehicle in person and, well, you know the rest. Osborne certainly hasn’t forgotten it. “The Bungie guys came out for a test drive, and during that they managed to find a new way to remove hubcaps from the vehicle,” he says wryly.

In the end, the only restriction that the time limit presented was in regards to the Warthog’s famous suspension. In-game, the vehicle bounces along on independent shocks for each wheel, but pulling that off would have taken a little longer than Weta had allotted. “The compromise was to use a regular axle, and then when they put it on film, they edited out the difference digitally in post-production,” Osborne comments. However, he concedes that it’s possible that it could be done, were the movie to ever go back into production.

But even without the independent suspension, the vehicle can still take a few hits without coming off badly. The original brief presented to the team asked that the Warthog be able to withstand being launched off a 20-foot bank. “I’m sure it’s possible,” muses Osborne, “but I’d be sitting back watching.”

Hesitantly, I put the big question out there. Given that I’ll be navigating a schoolyard roundabout within the hour, I wonder, can I press X to right myself if I accidentally flip the thing? “That’s the one problem we did run into,” Osborne replies sadly. “We couldn’t find a big enough X button.”

Wheel Life

And with that, the time for talking is over. Osborne revs the motor, raises the airbag suspension, and pulls out into the streets of Wellington, almost giving a heart attack to at least three drivers coming toward the vehicle along the two blocks to the school. When we get there, parking the Warthog comfortably on the roundabout, a crowd’s already beginning to gather, most of whom are texting friends and family within seconds — if they’re not using their cell phones to take photos, that is. Clearly, my assumption that the general public aren’t interested in nerdy gamer-lust objects was a bit premature. The cab driver probably would have understood immediately, had I shown him what I was talking about rather than trying to explain it.

Waiting for the rest of the Weta team to arrive, Osborne takes the chance to talk a little about the Warthog’s shortcomings, in regards to actually being drivable. “In a big area,” he says casually, “it’s not a problem. Visibility in this thing is not overly great, but it’s mostly just the sheer size of [it]. It’s 1,600 millimeters longer than a standard Nissan Patrol and about three or four hundred millimeters wider. The visibility in the cab is very, very limited. Driving around in the Workshop or maneuvering, you’ve really got to have eyes in the back of your head.”

He’s not kidding. While the rounded acrylic windshield might look incredible in-game — and on film, too — the fact that the left-hand crease lines up exactly with the driver’s line of sight could be considered a bit of an issue. Suddenly, I’m a little worried again, and this is before he even starts explaining the three different steering modes: front-wheel steering, four-wheel independent steering, and a frankly rather frightening prospect he refers to as “crab mode.”

“It lets you drive sideways,” he explains cheerily.

“I’m not sure I actually want to be driving sideways,” I reply, a definitely audible twinge of fear in my voice, before Osborne manages to reassure me that the exercise will go perfectly fine. After a very quick tutorial — sadly lacking in HUD reminders in big bold text — it’s my turn. And what do you know? It’s not only a whole lot of fun, but actually not that difficult either.

In fact, “a whole lot of fun” might just be the most grievous understatement ever printed. It’s a complete blast, and by the five-minute mark I’m swinging the vehicle around in tight circles, driving sideways, and actually having to hold myself back from trying to get air off that little mound of grass near one of the classrooms. It’s probably worth sending a little apology the way of the school, too: I’ve got no doubt that patch of turf I shredded will grow back, but the temptation to powerslide the Warthog really was too much to resist. Sorry about that.

At least in the end, when the vehicle runs into a soccer goalpost, leaving it posed at a perilous 45-degree angle, it’s not me driving. It’s the local Microsoft rep.

The Way The Ride Ends

With the visit winding to a close, the Weta team manages to pry me from the Warthog and return me to my hotel. The Warthog goes back to its home in a garage in the Workshop, until it’s needed for the next promotional event — its appearance at comics and games conventions around New Zealand has become something of a talking point.

Of course, unless the movie ever becomes an actuality, the replica is unlikely to be used for much more than a showpiece. Osborne says the team would be happy to build more of the vehicles, were the fi lm to ever go into production — possibly even with the independent suspension. “That would be the ideal thing,” he comments, “but like I said — there would be a lot of R&D involved in getting it working.”

Maybe that movie and vehicle will get made one day; maybe it won’t. But it’s comforting just knowing that one real Warthog exists, ready for active duty. Until that call comes, the vehicle sits in stasis, as if to say, “Wake me...when you need me.”