We're going to write this story, and bring it to life with the best technology available in an electronic game. There have been countless games on this theme, but few of them have the depth of story, detail or originality that you would find in a good sci-fi novel. We wanted to make the definitive game of conflict between the human race and an alien civilization.

In an online exclusive interview with Next Generation (archived on Marathon's Story's Halo page) one of Halo's early developers gave the following statement: Bungie themselves have commented on the similarity of the game and Niven's novels, and have since the original game was first announced. However, with Halo 6 rumored to be in development with a reveal coming (likely at E3 in just a few months time) it's good to look back at the similarities between the novels and the game series, if for no other reason than some cultural background. Of course, burden for this comes down to Bungie as they were the original team to put the Halo IP together. The Tales of Known Space… is a wide-ranging, complex, unusually well integrated future history which, within an essentially optimistic and technophilic frame, provides an explanatory structure for the expansion of humanity into space, one notable from the first for the complexity of the Universe into which it introduces the burgeoning human race' (Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, 873).The question of just how inspired Bungie was by Larry Niven's Ringworld series has been quietly boiling in the background and bubbles up every time a new Halo comes around. Larry Niven 'set his mark on the United States science fiction field, winning four short-fiction Hugos, and both Hugo and Nebula in 1971 for Ringworld (1970), a capstone title in his seminal Tales of Known Space sequence… In the novels and stories of this sequence, and in some of his other work, he was seen for some time as hard sf's last best hope and there can be no doubt that hard-sf writers dominant in the 1980s… owe much to the scope of Larry Niven's inventiveness, the sense he conveys of technological ingenuity as being ultimately beneficial, and his cognitive exuberance. Octavo, original illustrated wrappers by Dean Ellis. Paperback original first edition of this classic work, which went on to win the 1970 Nebula and 1971 Hugo award for best novel.

Ringworld by Larry Niven