After school

He was Massey’s youngest ever extramural student. Now he is a lead engineer for the blockbuster Xbox game Halo. Meet Chris Butcher. Malcolm Wood writes.

Preparing a new world for its opening is a painstaking job. February 2007, and on game developer Bungie’s web site hints are being dropped about what awaits: foliage that parts as you push through it, generating plays of dappled shadow; water that flows, that is rippled by winds; and hyperrealistic gunfire that takes on different characteristics when heard close by or off in the distance.

Near Chris Butcher’s office in Seattle, a host of human and alien life forms, good and evil – marines, brutes, elites, prophets – are being prepared to meet their public. Their dialogue is being scripted and recorded, their behaviour tweaked.

This is, as Chris terms it, the golden time. “All of the tools are there, all of the ideas are solidified. Now it’s really about execution and commitment to quality. Every hour counts.”

The world is that of Halo 3, the latest incarnation of a franchise that for the last six years has been the de facto standard by which the first-person-shooter video game genre is judged. Other games like it are often referred to ‘Halo clones’ or, if the anticipation is particularly eager or the hype particularly heavy, as possible ‘Halo killers’.

How successful has Halo been? Halo Combat Evolved, released in November 2001 as a launch title for Microsoft’s Xbox platform, sold more than five million copies worldwide. It was the Xbox’s ‘killer app’. Halo 2, released in November 2004, was the most popular video game on Xbox Live for two years, selling over seven million units by 2005.

Halo has spun off a series of novels. There is a fraternity of fans who use the graphics engine to create their own dubbed Halo movies (or machinima). There are even professional Halo players, Chris tells me, whose sponsorship contracts can go into six figures.

Little wonder that when I buy my copy of Halo 2 for research purposes, the salesman presses me for anything I may have learned from Chris about Halo 3’s release date. I tell him the topic was out of bounds.

“That figures,” he says.

Chris has been there through it all. Indeed Bungie’s web site places him among the company’s ‘grizzled ancients’. Not bad going for a 29-year-old. But then Chris has stolen a march on most people: he passed School Certificate before turning 10; began his studies at Massey at nine, and graduated with his first degree at 15.

Chris Butcher was born in Canterbury in 1978 to parents who were then working as scientists for the DSIR. But within a few years of his birth the family moved south. His father, Peter (whose varied career would include chemist, soil scientist, and botanist among the job descriptions) became a soil conservator for the Waitaki Catchment Commission based in Kurow, gateway to the tussock expanses of the Mackenzie country. His mother, Hilary, devoted her energies to Chris and his two siblings until they reached school age.1

Over these years the family alternated between workday weeks in Kurow, where they rented, and weekends and holidays in the seaside settlement of Kakanui where they owned a house.

They were, recalls Chris, idyllic times. In Kurow, he says, “we’d go and fly kites on the top of the hill in the nor’ west wind that blows down from the Alps, or we’d wander round and find little streams and river basins in this gorgeous tussock land”.

He and his siblings would roam the beach on weekends. “Even though I am not what you would call an outside person any more, having all that when I was growing up was really beautiful.”

He was also fortunate in his family culture. Both of his parents were, to use today’s terminology, lifelong learners; his mother Hilary in particular was there to read books to her toddler and talk to him whenever he wanted. “She deserves any and all credit for instilling a love of learning [in me] at an early age.”

When Chris entered Kurow Area School [now Waitaki Valley School] at age five, principal Stuart McDonald, noticed, in Chris’s words, “a little bit of potential”, and summoned an educational child psychologist. Chris’s reading age was assessed as that of a 12-year-old; in short order he was advanced two academic years and was receiving supplementary coaching in advanced mathematics from his mother, who would come into school to go over the textbooks with him.

His first experience of gaming came when he was four or five. The Waitaki District Catchment Commission housed a minicomputer (a Digital PDP 11/23), and sometimes Chris’s father Peter would sneak his precocious child in to surreptitiously play one of the resident games. They were games only a geek could love, the input going through a keyboard, the output emerging line by chattering line from a dot matrix printer.

“There was a Star Trek kind of game. It would print out the sector surrounding your spaceship, you would type in numbers for where you wanted to fire torpedoes, and then it would print out the sector again. That was fun.”

A few months later his father purchased a Sinclair ZX81, a computer console, which loaded its programmes via cassette tape and connected to a television as a monitor. “I would start by typing in games that I found in magazines and then I would modify them, changing little things.” On a more sophisticated Spectravideo SV-328 he installed a lunar lander game. “I’d make my own levels for it and change it so it would drop little weapon crates that the lunar lander would go and pick up. And I would get my brother to go and play it and tell me what he thought, and I would go and change things.”

At age eight, Chris remembers, he became intrigued by the content of the computer science classes his father Peter was taking extramurally through Massey.2 Programs coded on to punch cards would be sent to Palmerston North to be run on a mainframe computer and the results posted back. “That sounded really interesting, so I asked him if I could join in and do a few exercises.”

(Peter’s account is slightly different. He had intended that he and Chris should enrol in the same year when Chris was eight, but his son needed special approval and delays in the paperwork prevented him from enrolling until the following year.)

The next year, at age nine, with his father’s blessing and the help of the Massey Extramural Students Society [EXMSS] he enrolled in two papers, the first in a series that would lead to a double major in science and computing. (But for a delay in the processing of his application, Chris would have begun extramural study at the age of eight.)

For the first couple of years, he and Peter studied papers in common. Chris found it easy enough to grasp abstract concepts but his lack of life experience sometimes left him floundering. “There was a topic on managing your information systems and how to keep your projects on track, and I think I got an ‘E’ or something. I had no idea about business processes or anything like that. I was about 12. Still, an ‘E’: it was kind of humiliating.”

He sat the extramural exams in nearby Oamaru. “One of my fondest memories is of the woman who ran the examinations. She had this beautiful, large house with a gorgeous garden. I would get my parents to take me there early because I liked to talk to her, have tea and explore her garden. Sometimes I would try to finish the exam early just so I could wander around and read some of the interesting books she had.”

Chris also became a regular visitor to Palmerston North for vacation courses, first staying in motels with his father, then staying in student dormitories, and, finally, boarding with EXMSS president Liz Hawes and her partner, author, playwright and actor Peter Hawes.

“I loved taking time away from school and focusing on the courses for a couple of weeks. Going to six or seven hours of lectures a day focused on a particular mathematical topic was really exciting. I remember thinking, ‘Boy, the students going to college and attending lectures have it made. It’s so much easier than going through a text book and trying to figure it out for yourself’.”

How did he find the experience of being the solitary youngster in a class of adults?

“You put a kid in that sort of situation and they will be looking to make friends. If all the people in your class are 30 to 35-year-old men and women then you are going to try to make friends with them as best you can.”

One postgraduate teacher took him off to play Dungeons and Dragons with some of his postgraduate friends.

Liz and Peter Hawes remember Chris well. They have anecdotes of how he took a manuscript of Peter’s latest book to bed with him one evening and delivered an incisive critique the following morning (“not necessarily a most favourable one,” says Peter), of how when taken to a regional netball game the slightly-built Harry Potter-like youngster displayed an uncanny knowledge of performance and form, of how he achieved effortless mastery of the sound control system for one of Peter’s theatrical productions.

And they remember how well he was able to relate to everyone. Indeed, Chris was fascinated by his fellow students and the many walks of life they came from.

In the popular imagination giftedness shouldn’t be like this. Giftedness or genius, in Hollywood terms, should confer other compensatory disabilities. The gifted should be socially autistic or even schizophrenic, as in A Beautiful Mind, or at least dislocated and conflicted as in Good Will Hunting.

Chris isn’t that way at all. He seems almost distressingly well adjusted. To be sure, there is some link between autism-like conditions and mathematical ability, he says. (Asperger’s is sometimes called the ‘little professor syndrome’.) And some of the people he works with are certainly extraordinarily focused and single minded. But this isn’t him.

“I do like doing well and achieving things but I have always been more about learning and having fun and experiencing things. And that’s served me very well. I have never been that worried about being the best.”

At 15, Chris graduated from Massey with a BSc; at 16, while in his final year at school, he continued extramural study, acquiring a Postgraduate Diploma in Mathematics.

Then it was on to Otago, the nearest university to his family home. Strangely enough, although he took papers in computer science, he wasn’t sure he wanted to carry on with it. “I was really excited about being a scientist and discovering new things and helping make the world a better place.” He took papers in physics and chemistry, but computers, computer games, computer graphics were so much fun. Nothing could displace them.

“I always remember the disappointment of the chemistry professor at Otago when I told him I wasn’t going to go and do honours in chemistry because I just wanted to go on and do some computer graphics work.

“I loved the idea that you were creating these worlds that existed only inside the computer and then you were able to write code to render them and to look at them.”

He joined Otago’s computer graphics research group, and in his third year he and his fellow students would gather in the computer labs to play Marathon (another Bungie game) on the Macintoshes. An arms race between the systems administrators and the students ensued: the sysadmins determined to maintain network security, the students intent on bypassing it to run fragfests late into the night.

Chris added a masterate in computer science to his academic resumé, then commenced working on his PhD; his thesis addressed real-time visualisation of graphics for computer-aided modelling. “Things were going alright, but I wasn’t that happy with the progress I had made. I was looking at starting over or writing something that I thought would be sub-par. I was also running tournaments on the internet for Myth, another more strategic game Bungie had put out. So I was running these tournaments for hundreds of thousands of people on the internet. Then I saw that Bungie had a position for a computer graphics programmer on their web site.”

On spec, he sent in a couple of demos.3 Bungie liked them. He was interviewed by phone, flown to the United States, interviewed in person, and offered a job.

Who was his new employer? Bungie was set up in 1992 by Alexander Seropian to publish his self-penned Operation: Desert Storm. Bungie’s first significant success came with 1993’s Pathways into Darkness written for the Macintosh. Pathways was followed by Marathon in 1994, Myth in 1997 (Mac and PC), and Oni (Mac, PC and Playstation 2) in 2000. All garnered praise and awards.

The game that would become Halo was demoed at a Macworld in 1999. It looked spectacular. Certainly Microsoft, which was quietly preparing to enter the market with its own console was impressed; shortly afterwards it bought the company.

Although slated to work on Halo, Chris was first flown to San Jose to work on the artificial intelligence for Oni.

Bungie had found cheap office space amongst the urban sprawl, not that surrounding physical environment mattered too much to Chris.

“I was spending all my time at work back then. We were working 100, 110 hour weeks, and when I’d go do my laundry – I didn’t have my license at that time – the only other people I’d see walking would be wearing bathrobes and pushing shopping carts full of plastic bags.”

Once, so Bungie legend has it, he was so bushed that he fell asleep in a park on the way home.

“I think it was the fourth of July actually, because there were fireworks over San Jose, and I was walking home earlier than usual. I was so tired, I knew I had to go home and get some sleep. It was probably only around 10 or 11 and there were fireworks over downtown and I saw these people sitting out in the high school playing field. They had a nice view of downtown from there and they had folding chairs. I thought I’ll watch for a few minutes and then I’ll go home, and when I woke up I was cold and clammy and there was dew on my face.”

From Oni, Chris went on to work alongside fellow games developer Jaime Griesemer on the artificial intelligence for Halo 1, or more accurately, on working out ways of making the game’s characters act in ways that convey the illusion of intelligence.

Real artificial intelligence, according to Chris, is still many years away.

When Bungie was developing Pathway into Darkness in the early 1990s the development was done on a Mac IIFX. Described then as ‘wicked fast’, the IIFX ran at 40 MHz. Today the Xbox 360 gaming console runs with a three-core chip, each core running at 3200 MHz.

Advances in graphics processing power have allowed ever-increasing levels of detail and realism in gaming worlds. In fact, so real have the worlds become that game developers now contend with something they call the uncanny valley: when a character becomes cosmetically close to being real any aspect of its behaviour that seems unnatural will jar disproportionately.

“Games like Halflife II have very elaborate facial animation systems,” explains Chris, “and Ken Perlin [a professor at NYU] can create completely synthetic characters that appear to express emotion through their animation and through their reaction and their movement. But there is no real emotion behind any of that. We haven’t made any progress whatsoever towards actually simulating any kind of social interaction. There’s such a long way to go.”

What of the latest platform, the Nintendo Wii? Chris dismisses it as a toy. A clever toy that with its easy-to-use gaming wand will widen the game-playing demographic, but a toy nonetheless.

“Ultimately it’s a dead end. For me what is really interesting is creating game worlds that are stimulating and immersive.”

The Bungie of today is very different from the one he entered back in 1998. Microsoft’s acquisition and Halo’s success have meant many changes. For one thing, a change in location: Bungie is now located just outside Seattle, close by Microsoft’s Redmond campus. For another, a change in scale: 80-plus Bungie staff are dedicated to the Halo project, 18 of them engineers. Chris is one of five lead engineers.

For Chris, too, things have changed markedly. Living in Seattle, with its culture, climate and surrounding natural landscape, suits him well. He is happily married.

Does he miss the old days of 120-hour weeks? Not really.

“Everybody goes through that phase. You stay up late, you eat pizza, you drink Mountain Dew and write computer games. It’s the most fun thing in the world to be there with a bunch of people with a shared passion.”

He stays in touch with the people he worked with back in 1998 though. “Put people through hell together and they will form a bond with each other.”

As a lead engineer (and ‘grizzled ancient’) he can now even at times step back a little and think strategically about where next. So where will Halo go? Legions of Halo gamers want to know. Chris is somewhat bemused by the extent of the game’s fan base and he is fascinated by the many different ways people relate to the game: to the backstory of the Halo universe; to the sheer wonder of the game’s landscape; to the choice of playing in single or multiplayer mode.

His father, for example, still plays the original Halo release – which he prefers – and Halo 2 in single-player mode. They are, he says, the only Xbox games that hold an attraction for him.

Chris’s reaction to the phenomenon of his father the Halo player? “It’s surprising and really heartwarming and funny.”

Bungie is of course constantly reacting to the feedback from its fans, but not too slavishly. Sometimes what players say they want is not what they really want, Chris explains. The game’s aesthetic overrides all.

“One of the people I admire most is J.K.Rowling. She’s under such incredible pressure from the public to do X or to do Y or do Z. She has this real integrity. She respects and appreciates her fans, but she knows what she wants to do with Harry Potter. She knows how she wants to finish the tale.”

1 When her youngest child entered school, Hilary became a food technologist at Nestlé in Oamaru. Chris’s brother is now an airline pilot. His sister works for the Ministry of Education.

2 Chris’s father Peter was the EXMSS coordinator for North Otago.

3 One of them being an adaptive-level-of-detail terrain rendering engine allowing players to fly over Myth maps.

Playing by numbers

Gender of US gamers: 62 percent male 38 percent female.

Percentage of US heads of households who play computer or video games: 69 percent.

Average age of US frequent game purchaser: 40 years.

Percentage of US gamers over the age of 50: 25 percent.

Percentage of US gamer parents who report that they play video games with their children: 80 percent. Percentage of these who feel that playing games has brought their families closer together: 66 percent.

2005 US revenues for entertainment software products and directly related accessories: $10.5 billion.

Source: Entertainment Software Association www.theesa.com