Master Chief has become an enduring pop-culture figure and an important video game protagonist since his debut in 2001's Halo: Combat Evolved, but his design could have been very different. Marcus Lehto, the co-creator of Halo, was largely responsible for the Master Chief design that made it into the game, and in an interview with IGN he explained the process that led to the character's creation.

Lehto remembers how Halo started--a two-person team, consisting of him and Jason Jones, working on a sci-fi strategy title. "Even at that time, there was a character that we called 'The Super-Soldier'," he recalls, "and that super soldier was, in all honestly, the very root of what became the Master Chief."

Eventually they built a vehicle for him to drive (which would ultimately become the Warthog) and switched to a third-person camera, which meant continuing to beef up the character's design. "Through that time frame, of course, the Master Chief continued to turn from... this really, really simple block model to something that started to look more like this armored, true 'Super Soldier,'" he told IGN.