Halo Anime to be Overseen by 343 Industries

Earlier this week, a filing with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office for "343 Industries" was discovered, and savvy gamers immediately made the connection to Microsoft's Halo property. Initially we thought 343 was a development studio devoted to Halo within Microsoft Game Studios. 343 is actually charged with overseeing everything related to the Halo universe, however, according to the Los Angeles Times.

Master Chief gets the anime treatment

The first project that 343 will oversee is a series of seven Halo anime shorts called Halo Legends, it was revealed at Comic-Con this week. Microsoft's 343 is financing and overseeing production, while five production houses will work on the short films: Bones, Casio Entertainment, Production I.G., Studio4[Degrees]C, and Toei Animation. Shinji Aramaki, director of Appleseed and Appleseed Ex Machina, is also helping with production as the creative director. Microsoft will preview the Halo anime on Xbox Live this fall and has partnered with Warner Bros. to bring them to DVD, Blu-ray and other digital platforms in early 2010.

Former Bungie man Frank O'Connor, who's serving as creative director of 343, commented, "It's a wildly varied genre, but anime creators do things with weapons and vehicles and technology nobody else does, and that marries very well with Halo. It's amazing to see some of the new stuff they're introducing and how neatly it maps to the visual aesthetics in the Halo universe."

Although the production houses will have a lot of freedom with the anime, O'Connor said 343 will still be heavily involved. "Depending on the studio, we did everything from writing the stories to feeding them with characters and scenarios they could explore," he said. "I think the core Halo fans will recognize key moments from the universe never shown in the game. They're moments where people wanted more depth. That's where this fits."

We feel this is a great move by Microsoft to really extend its Halo brand, and fans are likely to eat it up. We're curious to see what Halo projects 343 will oversee in the future. Perhaps that Halo movie will eventually see the light of day.  "If you look at how George Lucas held on to Star Wars, not just to make money from action figures but to control the direction the universe went in, you can see why we think it's pretty vital," noted O'Connor. "Luckily, Microsoft has the resources to enable us to do that."

[Update: You can read more about Halo Legends in this press release.]

Microsoft isn't the only publisher pushing its IP in the short films direction. Ubisoft, thanks to its acquisition of Hybride, is producing Assassin's Creed II: Lineage, three live-action films that are 10-15 minutes in length each. The idea is that the films can serve as a prologue for the upcoming November release of the much anticipated video game.