Exclusive Interview w/ Marty O'Donnell on GamerGate, Halo and the Wokeification of Video Games
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All right.
Very excited to have our next guest on today.
He's a candidate for Congress, but you guys might know him from his, shall we say, his other career as a composer in the digital entertainment space.
Ladies and gentlemen, Marty O'Donnell joins Human Events Daily.
Thank you, Jack, for having me on the show.
And you know what?
One of these days, we'll be in the studio at the same time.
So I can actually physically meet you rather than virtually meet you.
We will, we will.
And of course, so Marty, there's, you know, there's no question that folks out in the audience for people saying, scratch my eyes, who is Marty O'Donnell?
Marty O'Donnell is, of course, the composer of the award-winning and best-selling video game series, the music for Halo.
That's right.
You know, the other thing is I've actually had two careers because I'm that old.
My first career was in doing television scores and jingles.
And one of the jingles was, we are Flintstones kids, 10 million strong and growing.
That was you?
Some people.
Yeah, that was me.
Oh, my gosh.
You just unlocked a core memory for me here.
So it's your fault.
It's my fault.
Yeah, I put that melody.
I hope those things were actually good because I would beg my mom to get them because I couldn't get the song out of my head.
That was the goal.
I had the same goal with the monk channel to get that into people's heads so they would play Halo.
So I mean, of course, as a Catholic, right?
You know, it's, you know, it's just amazing to see Gregorian chant be put on such a platform like that.
When you, I got to ask, you know, before we get into the political side, when you were working on the series, did you know that it was going to be as big as it was?
Yes, I was completely convinced that this was going to be a really hot thing, and we were going to exceed all expectations.
And people would be playing that game for maybe an entire year after we released it.
That's how successful I thought it was going to be.
Which, by the way, at the time, if you had a game that was still being played a year after you released it, it was like beyond your wildest dreams.
You know, we might sell a million units.
You know, that was, we really expected it to be great, but trust me, nobody anticipated that 25 years later, you know, it would still be popular and they would bring it back almost exactly the way we shipped it for the 25th anniversary next year, or that somebody like President Trump would be using it as memes.
None of that stuff was expected.
Well, I was just going to get into that because, you know, here we are.
And I had done your show earlier this year.
And so we've kind of been chatting back and forth.
And then we were working to get you on, trying to get schedules to sync up.
And lo and behold, then we have GameStop tweeting out that Trump has ended the console wars, the great Xbox PlayStation, et cetera, console wars, Nintendo.
And then it just began this sort of meme explosion between GameStop and the White House and DHS of Trump and Halo mashed up.
I think we have a couple of the memes, right, guys?
Sure.
Throw some of those up for people who are watching.
I mean, we're good at this guy.
Just what was it like to have seen something that you worked on so long ago just kind of taking over the taking over the entire internet like that?
Well, it was surreal.
First of all, we had, as a surprise, Microsoft is re-releasing Halo 1 pretty much in its entirety.
The original music, the original voices, the original story, just upgraded, up-res graphics next year.
So they announced that.
And that's why GameStop came out and said the console wars are over because Microsoft also is going to be releasing it on the PlayStation, which, you know, nobody would have anticipated.
And then immediately when the White House jumped on that and said, you know, another war ended by President Trump, it just was hilarious at first because you knew that the left was going to go insane and they wouldn't get the humor.
And it just kept going from there.
And, of course, me and my folks, since I'm running for office now, jumped on it and quote tweeted it and got millions of views.
And it was great timing.
I loved it.
It was once I, like I said, though, it was surreal.
Like who would have anticipated something like this?
I love the idea that Halo is finally being used by the right.
Even if it's slightly tongue-in-cheek, it's, you know, video games have been blamed for so much violence over the years, and it's great to see it mainstreamed by conservatives and the White House.
Well, I think it's great too.
And in a sense, not to get all into it, but there's always been a lot of gamers in the MAGA community because it was gamers who very long time ago, almost 11 years ago now, started calling out the lies of the gaming media.
And not to relitigate all that, but they were sort of the first ones to say, hey, this, we didn't even have the word wokeness back then.
We called them SJWs, social justice warriors.
And said, hey, they're trying to inject all of this politically correct nonsense into our games.
And we just want to play a great game.
We just want to be able to play Halo.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And I've always felt like the first, what we called Gamergate was the impetus for the sort of youthful conservative movement.
You know, I can't take credit for any of that, but I feel like, you know, in the early 2000s and through the 2000s, most of us who were making video games were making games.
And our slogan was, we want to make games that we want to play, which meant that we were gamers who loved playing games.
And so we were making games that we felt were cool and fun.
And, you know, the audience and you kids responded really positive to that.
And then at some point in the, you know, 2012, 13, 14, someplace in there, definitely the agenda started coming in from the corporate offices and the wokeness and the HR departments.
And suddenly DEI started infecting how games were being made and how game studios were being put together.
And you saw it yourself, yourself working in the industry.
Yeah, I saw the beginning of it.
Luckily, I was fired from Bungie, which is a whole other story in 2014, just before we released Destiny.
And that's a whole different subject.
I wasn't fired because of wokeness and I wasn't fired because of my political beliefs.
It was creative differences.
But I did start to see it creeping in.
I started to see it creeping into how HR worked, how people were being hired as the studios got bigger and bigger.
I started my own studio after that with a friend who was in agreement with me about how studios should be run.
And we were able to do what we wanted to do, and that was fine.
But we did see it happening in some of the really big AAA studios that would have 800 to 1,000 people that they'd hire.
And they were hiring people for the wrong reasons.
And we saw it happening and we saw the games starting to be infected with the SJW concepts, which turned into what I would call the woke mind virus.
And it was a shame because it meant that the games were really no longer fun to play.
They were preachy.
Well, and that was the biggest issue.
And so it was, you know, it's a, you know, you're right, though.
It was 2014, right around that era where, you know, this whole thing exploded online.
I, you know, had an anonymous account myself at the time and, you know, kind of caught wind of what was happening where, you know, people on Twitter at the time were just firing up these journalists and saying, you guys are lying.
You're totally fake.
You're pushing wokeness.
You're trying to destroy the things that we love and we're sick of it.
And that kind of nucleus has really turned itself into the MAGA movement.
Now, funny enough, mine, and to be clear, mine was not from video games.
I was actually in kind of the Game of Thrones world back then.
Oh, that's a story.
That's a story for another day.
I'll be right back.
We're on with Marty O'Donnell.
I want to get back with the legendary composer of Halo, and he's running for Congress.
All right,
Jack Posobiec, we are back live and super excited to be on with the legendary composer of not just the Flintstones kids vitamin song, but also the composer of the Halo series, Marty O'Donnell.
And we're actually just talking about how the rise of wokeness in gaming was one of the first places where, you know, where all of this came up.
But before we get back to that interview, I just want to tell you folks, you know, I've been telling you, pay attention to what's happening with the dollar.
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All right, back on with Marty O'Donnell.
And so, Marty, there's people who have said, and you just told us that incredible story about seeing sort of the rise of wokeness in the gaming industry.
There's a sense from a lot of people that have said, they said, you know, we've passed peak woke, that Hollywood has gone past peak woke.
Do you think that we're there yet?
Or do you think it's still kind of lurking around?
Where do you think we're at?
I think it's going underground.
I think especially with the repudiation of the woke movement by the country voting for Donald Trump and changing the political climate.
It's wonderful to see these DEI programs go away, but I don't think they're completely gone.
And I think we have to be pretty vigilant because some of these HR departments are just kind of being renamed.
They rename it to something else.
So I think we have to keep stomping on this thing.
Meritocracy needs to be the rule of the day.
And so we have to stay on top of it and watch for when it pops its head up again.
Yeah, and that's always what it used to be, right?
It always used to be just the best man, the best woman gets the job, whatever it is.
Don't care what the background is.
If we're all here to put together something, then we're just going to take the best to the best.
And there isn't going to be any question about that.
And somewhere along the line, you know, these wokeys got in and started saying, oh, no, you got to change your percentages.
And, you know, you can't have female characters that look like that, et cetera, et cetera.
And then inevitably, it just ruins the product.
Yeah.
And like I said, when I was making games, it was our slogan was, we make games that we want to play.
And then after I was gone from Bungie, Bungie changed its slogan to we create worlds that bring people together, which is just has such a wokey sound to it.
And I think people notice it.
All the companies that are making games because they have some sort of an agenda.
The fans go, wait a minute, what happened to the fun?
What happened to the coolness?
Why am I being told to put my personal pronouns in my character?
Or one of the worst things is when you go to a character creation screen and it says body type one, body type two.
There's no male and female anymore.
And it just, every one of those little things is just a reminder of the agenda that these corporations have.
Oh, it's so annoying.
By the way, I love the bring worlds together because the entire plot of Halo is worlds that are at war with each other.
It's the plot of the series.
It's a war world.
And the other thing.
One of my favorite little slogans that Bungie had way back in the day was: kill your enemies, kill your friends' enemies, kill your friends.
Well, and that's what it was.
I remember, you know, I remember playing those games and in the early days, kind of, and I'm, you know, maybe dating myself a little bit, but even back to the first Xbox, that, you know, it wasn't the online play that was the, you know, that was really at the forefront.
It was, it was getting your friends, you know, three, four friends together in one evening and having a party and lighting each other up.
Yeah, you're all on the couch, right?
And that's what you're doing.
So, yes, absolutely.
I was, you know, killing my friends in Halo, in Halo.
And having a blast doing it and knowing that it was serious.
There was nothing serious about it.
It was just a slightly more adult version of playing, you know, World War II when you were a kid or playing Cowboys and Indians or whatever.
It was your friends.
Funning or game canceling out.
I can't say that anymore.
Cowboys and Indians.
Yeah, I know.
I know.
Well, that's funny.
It's funny you mentioned that total aside, but my kids who are seven and four, they were, they told me a while ago now, but I said, what are you guys playing?
They said, we're playing Cowboys and Indians.
And I said, how do you guys know Cowboys and Indians?
And they're just like, that's what we play.
We play Cowboys.
I had never said it to him.
I had never once said it.
But there's a reason that these archetypes, there's a reason that these stories resonate throughout our society, throughout childhood, especially with young men, young women too, to some extent, but especially with young men, because even with a war game like this, military science fiction, because that's what young men have an innate and natural interest in.
Yeah, and I have three grandsons.
I raised two daughters.
And by the way, both my daughters were somewhat interested in the games that I made and played, but they never got quite as addicted to it.
But my three grandsons are, I can see it already.
They're just different than daughters, right?
And so they're very interested in playing the kind of games that I made and like.
And that's fine.
You know, it's just, that's just the way things are.
Yeah, there's an interesting phenomenon about things that kids do.
Kids pass on what they're doing, their nursery rhymes, their games to other kids, and the parents are not involved.
So that just keeps coming down generation after generation because the group of kids pass it to the next little group of kids.
And you can't stomp this stuff out.
That's why they're still playing Cowboys and Indians.
So you're running for Congress.
You've switched that over.
Tell me a little bit about the race.
It's Nevada 3, Susie Lee, the Democrats in there.
It's a district that Trump won.
She only won by about 10,000 votes.
You're running 2026.
Walk us through it real quick.
Two minutes.
Yeah, sure.
I am very interested in flipping this seat, and so are the Republicans in Washington.
Obviously, Susie Lee is just a mouthpiece, a rubber stamp for the Democrat Party.
I'm a lifelong conservative.
I'm a huge fan of President Trump and voted for him three times.
And I'm looking forward to being support in the midterm so that we hold the House and keep the Trump administration going for the full four years.
I'm also super interested in working to make sure that our country can have it so that one good job is enough to raise a family.
And we need to get back to the idea that you need one good job and you can raise a family.
You can have a pizza on Friday nights and maybe take a vacation and raise your kids the way you want them to be raised and get them in schools that you want.
And we need to get back to that sort of economic situation as soon as possible.
And I think President Trump and his administration is the way to do it.
Well, that's incredible.
Well, Marty, you've got my support because we know that we absolutely need fighters in there, someone who has seen wokeness from inside the belly of the beast, someone who understands what it's like to go up against that industry and, by the way, be able to speak truth to power, and someone who just gets it, someone who just absolutely gets it.
Where can people go to get more information to get involved in the race?
Go to martyforcongress.com.
You can also go to martyforcongress.vote.
Either one will take you to the exact same place.
And, you know, register.
You can contribute, of course, which is we need it because it's a national race and a lot of Democrat money is going to come in against me.
But just even just registering so I can keep in touch with you is a wonderful thing.
