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Video game Halo 4 grossed an eyewatering $220m on the day it was released, and now Halo 5 is just hitting the shelves — and the hype button. We headed to Seattle, home of Microsoft, to catch up with its creative director and long time sci-fi fan, Sparth...

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Words by Joel Meadows

With the sound of your own breathing loud in your ears, you draw a bead on an ugly alien through your telescopic sight and squeeze the trigger. It's a direct hit and its head explodes in a cloud of streamers and confetti. That's one of the lighter moments in the relentless off-earth battles against the theocratic aliens that make up the aggressive (so, it's clearly OK to bump them off for entertainment) Covenant in the first-person shooter video game franchise Halo.

These days, added to the multibillion-dollar grossing big screen names such as George Clooney and Sandra Bullock are now the equally valuable alternative screen heroes such as Master Chief (Halo), Bubba (Grand Theft Auto) and Desmond Miles (Assassin's Creed). The last iteration of Halo - Halo 4 - grossed a staggering $220m on its day of release in 2012 and Halo 5 has just hit the streets (well, living and bedrooms anyway).

Sparth illustrations of spaceships and cities created outside of his work for the Halo franchise

Earlier this year, before the hype started to ramp up, we caught up with its art director - Sparth. That's the nickname of Nicolas Bouvier, the man with overall creative responsibility for the immersive alien worlds, from jungle to cityscape, from spaceship to arsenal, for these unearthly, yet strangely real worlds. French-born Bouvier, now lives and works in Seattle, home of Microsoft, which bought Halo's original producer Bungie in 2000. Sparth, is a nom de plume that's a mix of Spartan and Arthur, his son - but he's very unwarrior-like in the flesh. I met up with this soft-spoken, very French, creative in the suitably off-world, twisted-metal surrounding of the downtown Seattle W hotel.

Sparth illustrations of spaceships and cities created outside of his work for the Halo franchise

Bouvier is a craftsman, who thrives on the pressure of working on one of the world's most successful games. Not surprisingly, he began sketching as a very young child while in France, before moving with his family to Singapore, then to the USA and finally back to his homeland, where he went to the École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs in Paris. He 'worked his arse off' and it was here that he got his first professional gig, on Scientific magazine.

Concept artwork for Halo 5 Guardians ranging from cities, through jungles, to spaceships and crash sites

Then video games were pretty basic affairs to say the least, and the idea of it being a career path was unimaginable. In fact, he ended up in gaming almost by accident through working in publishing 'multimedia' in the mid-Nineties. Touted as the next big thing, multimedia went the way of Betamax. 'But that's when games took over and it simply exploded,' recalls Bouvier. 'I remember one day a friend said: "Hey Nick, I'm working with a small studio in Paris doing games and might need a concept artist in house. Do you want to give it a try?" So, I went there and I was super happy.

Concept artwork for Halo 5 Guardians ranging from cities, through jungles, to spaceships and crash sites

Then in 1998, the company Infogrames, which owned Atari - a big company at the time - came to see us.' From then on a career path opened up. It was a career that has seen him visualising and working on a host of household-name games including Alone in the Dark (4), Prince of Persia (Warrior Within), Assassin's Creed and Rage, before coming on board with Halo 4. Along the way his art work has featured on more than 80 book covers and he's also the author of the Structura books, which bring together his drawings, with a few hints and tips on the tricks of the illustrator's trade.

Concept artwork for Halo 5 Guardians ranging from cities, through jungles, to spaceships and crash sites

Like any obsessive creative, Bouvier continued to fill sketchbook after sketchbook as he had done since his youth, but in 1999 he truly switched to creating art digitally. 'I have never painted,' he says, adding, 'I sketched with a Rotring art pen - sometimes, I still do a bit - but mostly I don't really have the time.' He began using a drawing tablet in 1992 and while making the switch over, he used a hybrid process, drawing traditionally, scanning in his work and adjusting and augmenting it in Photoshop. He believes his move to digital has been the making of him: 'To be honest I don't think I would be the artist I am now if I had not been going through my 15-year digital phase. I wouldn't have achieved as much. I had a lot of breakthrough moments on the digital side that I would not have done if I had stayed drawing on paper.'

Concept artwork for Halo 5 Guardians ranging from cities, through jungles, to spaceships and crash sites

As he came to Halo only in its fourth outing, he explains there are many things you obviously can't mess with: 'There are a lot of legacy things that we have to respect when it comes to what Bungie did back in the day. This is a franchise, so when it comes down to it, we don't have the full freedom of imagining everything.'

Concept artwork for Halo 5 Guardians ranging from cities, through jungles, to spaceships and crash sites

But when he does get to let loose creatively, his biggest influence apart from comics (he doesn't like the rigidity and delineation of penciler, inker and colourist, that exists in US comics) is sci-fi, whether it be on film, TV or in print. The films of the Seventies and Eighties loom particularly large for him, especially Ridley Scott's Alien and Bladerunner: 'With Ridley Scott there was a very careful attention to detail for what I would call military tech design. It's there to function. You have to make people believe that all that stuff is actually real and a function-oriented design is something that's very important.'

Concept artwork for Halo 5 Guardians ranging from cities, through jungles, to spaceships and crash sites

He is also influenced by the work of British classic sci-fi book-cover artists such as Chris Foss and Jim Burns, and he has fond memories of a particular cover, the British cover to Isaac Asimov's Pebble in the Sky, by artist Peter Elson. A quick trawl of his Sparth website or any of his books backs this up.

Concept artwork for Halo 5 Guardians ranging from cities, through jungles, to spaceships and crash sites

Bouvier's love of world building also comes from an inspiration much closer to home: 'I am a huge fan of architecture. This probably comes from my education and my family. In the Eighties and Nineties, my dad was the president of a big French construction firm. He got to meet people like IM Pei and I was always fascinated when he brought home architecture books from the office. I remember one day he even came back with bolts from the Eiffel Tower - because he was also the president of the company that built it! I was surrounded by architecture.

Individual non-halo 'space vehicle' study by Sparth

'I'm also really fascinated by skyscrapers and verticality. Verticality is something that I find profoundly fascinating. I have been skyscraper-watching for years - it's a bit of a passion for me. There's a website where they have plans and diagrams of all the skyscrapers that have been built, all of the skyscrapers that are in construction and all the ones that are planned,' he obsesses.

Concept artwork for Halo 5 Guardians ranging from cities, through jungles, to spaceships and crash sites

'Unfortunately, I have never been to Chicago. I saw the skyline from far away waiting at the airport. I was looking at the city skyline with a lot of envy. But, I would say the thing that has fascinated me the most is the competition between Chicago and New York and it lasted for quite a while. Until the Twenties or Thirties, New York was the big winner between the two cities, but Chicago still had a lot of amazing buildings. But I find these two cities fascinating,' he admits.

Concept artwork for Halo 5 Guardians ranging from cities, through jungles, to spaceships and crash sites

Bouvier is clearly a driven man. He doesn't have 'hobbies' because that implies he doesn't enjoy every living moment of his work. He is an avid photographer, which feeds right back into his illustration and, therefore, working life. While he'll always make time for his wife and three children, he's the first to admit he's something of a workaholic. But, that's perhaps what happens when you're at the heart, or possibly are the heart, of one of the world's biggest gaming franchises. And at the heart of Halo is a desire to create something that feels real, and this is in very large part thanks to Sparth.

Concept artwork for Halo 5 Guardians ranging from cities, through jungles, to spaceships and crash sites

Halo 5: Guardians

Nicolas Bouvier tells how the game has evolved: 'Halo 5 is a larger game with an enormous amount of features and content. When we started working on Halo 4, back in 2009, we had everything to put in place for the game, on top of making a new studio, not to mention the players, and public and players' expectations since the Halo franchise was transitioning from Bungie to 343 Industries and Microsoft.

Concept artwork for Halo 5 Guardians ranging from cities, through jungles, to spaceships and crash sites

We are now into a different configuration: 343 Industries has grown a lot out of Halo 4, and gained a lot of maturity and experience. In other words, we became even more expert at crafting playable universes and implementing impactful gameplay. Halo 5 is bolder in a lot of ways than its predecessor, and not just because of the tremendous amount of content. Visually speaking, we are obviously benefiting from the XBox 1 processing capabilities, which allows us to give players a more immersive experience at 60FPS. But, Halo 5 features so many new game modes and skills, it would be impossible to name them all.

A press shot from the official game launch in Sydney at the end of October

We have now what we call 'spartan abilities' that allow players to enhance their actions and movements within maps, for example like climbing walls or using the Thruster Pack to rapidly move in any direction. I would also mention we have a huge new multiplayer mode called Warzone, which allows 24 players to fight in huge dedicated arenas. The maps are organised around a set of base systems with their own military aesthetics. Because of the tremendous content, Warzone is definitely looking like a game within a game. It's a sure fact that as art director I dedicated all my efforts to making this experience look unforgettable.'