There’s usually only a few days notice, but when Steve Downes gets the call, everything changes. He becomes quieter, more withdrawn and, as his wife says, not nearly as much fun to be around. When the Chicago voice actor first auditioned for the role of Master Chief in 2001, Downes was told to envision a hero like Clint Eastwood in old Spaghetti-western films: someone with little use for words, and whose primary focus is getting the job done. Ten years later, when the time rolls around to step in the booth and record Master Chief’s dialogue for a new Halo game, Downes slips on a pair of scruffy cowboy boots. “It puts me in the mood,” he says.

The image of Master Chief as an intergalactic gunslinger in the Halo series is tough to argue — he’s rarely seen without an arm canon — but the emotions and thoughts of the guy behind that reflective visor have been left intentionally clouded. Unlike Alan Wake or Bulletstorm’s Grayson Hunt— well-defined characters in games who typically let you know what they’re thinking — Master Chief’s psyche has been more fiercely guarded than what he looks like physically. “I used to get a lot of mail from girls, Asian kids, black kids,” says Halo franchise development director Frank O’Connor. “When you have a faceless hero, it’s much easier to identify with them.”

It’s clear that the popularity of the Halo series — and, by extension, Master Chief — partially stems from being able to take control of this 7-foot, 1,000-pound supersoldier, his thick silence acting as a catalyst that allows you to develop a connection with him that blurs the lines between player and character.

The voice of Master Chief, Steve Downes. 

FACE OFF 
When you think of a hypothetical Mount Rushmore of videogame characters, Master Chief’s bust would fit right alongside the stone-chiseled likenesses of Mario and Sonic the Hedgehog. And yet, in this scenario, Master Chief still represents something of a paradoxical oddball: a mysterious killing machine with a heart of gold.

Thanks to that massive green-and-gold helmet that completely encases his head and face, there’s no visible tip-off to Master Chief’s mental state. We’re blind to his facial expression when he thinks of his responsibility to, say, save all sentient life forms. We wonder: does he ever cringe when lumbering around in his heavy armor? Other major gaming icons, like Mario and Luigi, wear enthusiastic smiles or clever smirks to indicate they’re more than happy to hop on that turtle or absorb a mushroom.

In other mediums, too, masks have been powerful tools for sparking intrigue in popular media, be it comic book heroes like Iron Man or Spider-Man, rock acts like Slipknot or KISS, or even Star War’s Darth Vader. But Master Chief does not appear to embrace duel identities, like an alter ego, for instance, and seems committed to keeping concealed. Not knowing what he looks like is a major part of his mystique, and his face still hasn’t ever been shown in any of the Halo games or box art. In many ways, Chief is the purest embodiment of the faceless hero. There have been some approved literary reveals, though. In early Halo fiction — like Eric Nylund’s The Fall of Reach and William C. Dietz’s The Flood — Master Chief’s mysterious appearance is described in detail. Dietz portrays Master Chief as pale-skinned and generally haggard-looking as a result of his armor and continuous battles. “I wanted to humanize him,” Dietz explains.

A HERO’S HISTORY
In games, only Master Chief’s actions and voice give glimpses into the personality encased in all that metal. His deeds are noble and brave, and his speech is gruff, salty, and terse — but not without humor. Downes says in his first recording session for Master Chief, he had to work out who the character was in front of Bungie. Downes would lower his voice, then make it louder. He’d speak deeply, only to get told to go softer. He’d intonate emotion, but just so much. “And the more they refined what I was doing, the better sense I had of who this guy was,” Downes says.

So just who is Master Chief? “I think he’s more complicated than people give him credit for,” Downes says. “He has feelings, but he doesn’t feel right about having them.”

Because Halo as a franchise and brand encompasses so many different branches, there’s several places outside of games that let you gain more insight into Master Chief: comics, anime, and books. Even still, there can be inconsistencies in content, something O’Connor acknowledges: “The games ultimately define the canon and the direction.”

A shorthand account of Master Chief’s upbringing from official canon reads like a ludicrous backstory of intense personal anguish and sacrifice. Under the helmet, Master Chief is a guy named John: he’s from another galaxy, was stolen from his mother when he was six, got assigned a number (117), and was raised to be a supersoldier for the human-led United Nations Space Command. As a teen, he was bio-engineered for physical and mental enhancements, which made him faster and stronger. In short, he was kidnapped and manufactured into a freakish weapon for the UNSC to use against its enemies, alien or otherwise.

A scene from the Halo animated series, Halo Legends.

Fiction is rich with morality tales, like Frankenstein, warning about the dangers of tampering with the human condition. In American culture too, we’re also cautioned about the destructive nature of bottling up emotions. “You could conceive that rather than being a loyal soldier without any doubts, given his childhood and what was done to him, Master Chief could be filled with angst and anger or hatred towards the people that did this to him,” author Dietz tells us. “As a writer, it’s natural to go there and think about that. So I put the idea forward [to Bungie] as something we might want to work on, but as I recall, got no reinforcement on it.”

Mental enhancements or no, traumatic childhood memories could have led Chief down the path of rebellion. But he’s an obedient soldier, just maybe a little quiet, which comes across more as a sign of humility than as a chip on his shoulder. “When he says something — and he rarely speaks — it should be the kind of thing you could imagine yourself saying in that situation,” O’Connor says. In games, you’ll hear Chief at his most talkative in Halo cutscenes, speaking in short, determined sentences, but only when needed. He’s at his most reserved during combat, his silence amplified amid the sounds of Covenant (or Flood) battles with his fellow Marines. “He has a kind of aloofness that’s born of necessity,” says O’Connor. “Where it’s like: I’m very alien to these Marines, but these are my charges; my colleagues are these Spartans and they suffer the same isolation from regular, unaugmented humans that I do.”

Fan photo courtesy AdamGrumbo.com.

MAN IN THE MIRROR
Maybe Master Chief is best defined by the fans who’ve been living vicariously through him in games. Joyce C. Havstad, contributor to the recent book of essays, Halo and Philosophy: Intellect Evolved, argues that while Chief’s character does possess core traits (integrity, for instance), perhaps a singular definition of who he is under the armor doesn’t need to exist. Anyone who’s ever played as Master Chief in a Halo game has brought along his or her own experiences into the mix, creating a sort of communal identity for the big green guy.

“Each unique conception adds another point, near or far, to the cluster scattered around the core concept of Master Chief’s identity,” she says. “For example, a small child playing Master Chief, imagining him as quite young, might be conceiving of the character in a way that relates well to earlier stages in Master Chief’s development, perhaps more like he was as (the younger) John-117.”

So if you really need to see the true face of Master Chief, you might be best served by looking into the eyes of the millions of players who have taken control of the hero Spartan.

“Master Chief is the perfect soldier, because he always obeys orders. This is true in the field, and it’s also true in your head,” Havstad says. “Whoever you want Master Chief to be, he’ll become that for you.” And with a new Halo trilogy on the way, there will be plenty of chances for Downes to put on those cowboy boots and breathe even more life into Xbox’s greatest character, one that just may forever remain an enigma caged in green, black and gold. “It’s a core [reason] why people get close to him,” Downes says. “I also don’t think it’s any coincidence that his visor is reflective. What do you see when you look at him? You see yourself. And that’s the point.”

EPILOGUE: BEHIND EVERY GREAT MAN
When we asked O’Connor which character in the Halo universe helps to define Master Chief best, he’s quick to respond. “Cortana,” he tells us unhesitatingly — the UNSC’s prized female A.I. and the voice most often in Master Chief’s ear. The pair’s relationship has grown throughout the Halo games, and it’s been likened to everything from mother and son to boyfriend and girlfriend. “Those things are all partnerships,” O’Connor says. “She’s the emotional half of that partnership, and she’s going to have a lot of challenges in her future if you pay attention to the story. It’s an interesting thing, but I can’t say more about it.”

In broader terms, essayist Joyce C. Havstad says the relationship between two forms a more perfect union in ways we haven’t yet conjured. “It’s possible for anyone to reconsider the gender of Master Chief when they realize that he has an implanted female A.I. Together Master Chief and Cortana form a sort of hybrid character unlike anything anyone in reality has yet experienced, and which might not correlate well with traditional gender roles.”