Can he save a beleaguered video game system? Master Chief routinely saves the universe. The Xbox One has lost considerable ground to Sony’s PlayStation 4, which is seen by many as the superior, cheaper and, in its vibrant sweep of games, more relevant machine. Sixteen years later, Microsoft hopes Master Chief can repeat that trick with Halo 5. The company has sold more than 65m Halo games, and almost as many Xbox consoles on which to play them. The game, Microsoft hoped, would legitimise the machine. Two years later, Halo launched alongside Microsoft’s Xbox console, a piece of hardware that was seen as a folly from a company that had no business in video games beyond flight sims and solitaire. Within a year, the space marine, his game and Bungie, the company behind it all, were sold to Microsoft. Chief padded on to the screen behind Jobs, a symbol of Apple’s nascent gaming ambitions. The lights dimmed and Halo’s melancholic choral refrain sounded in the background. In 1999, Steve Jobs paced the Macworld Conference stage proclaiming that the video-game footage he was about to show was the “coolest” he’d seen. M aster Chief was first introduced to the world, not by Microsoft, but by Apple.

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