Halo’s Warthog Comes To Life
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Halo 4 is a huge hit. That’s putting it mildly. When the game was released on November 6, 2012, it racked up an astonishing $220 million in 24 hours. With numbers like that, it’s safe to say that there are some hardcore fans of the franchise out there. Because they can, 343 Industries went out and commissioned someone to build them their very own Warthog.
For those of you not in the know, the Warthogs are the anti-infantry vehicles used by the United Nations Space Command. Over the course of four games, the vehicles have undergone some minor changes, but the overall appearance has remained largely the same. Imagine a convertible dune buggy on steroids and with a mean streak.
343, a subset of Microsoft, tasked the Irvine, California-based Aria Group with the chore of recreating the Warthog. Aria is best known for creating concept cars for big-time auto shows, but they’ve also worked on movies such as Transformers 3.
Frank O’Connor, 343’s franchise development director, and a 10-year Halo vet, says, “We really just wanted to build something that people could literally see and touch and reach out and enjoy.”
This is a big project, one with a budget that ran into the hundreds of thousands of dollars and took six months to complete. Mounted on the chassis of a 1996 Hummer H1, the Warthog is accurate down to the fake nuts and bolts, and even the gauges, dials, and switches in the interior.
The finished product is kind of a beast, eight feet wide and 17 feet long, with 49-inch tires to roll over anything that gets in its way. As bad as it looks, even with a V-8 engine, the Warthog should only be driven at a modest 25 miles per hour for safety concerns. O’Connor does say, however, that he has it on good authority that it will top the in-game max speed of 68 mph.
Good luck finding a place to drive this, unlike this fanmade version.
