Human Events Daily with Jack Posobiec - Exclusive Interview w⧸ Marty O'Donnell on GamerGate, Halo and the Wokeification of Video Games

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00:00:30.000 This is what happens when the fourth turning meets fifth generation warfare.

00:00:40.660 A commentator, international social media sensation, and former Navy intelligence veteran.

00:00:46.960 This is Human Events with your host, Jack Posobiec.

00:00:50.400 Christ is king.

00:00:52.240 All right, Jack Posobiec, we're back here.

00:00:53.760 Human Events, daily Real America's Voice.

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00:02:08.140 All right.

00:02:08.560 Very excited to have our next guest on today.

00:02:13.900 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.

00:02:29.220 Ladies and gentlemen, Marty O'Donnell joins Human Events Daily.

00:02:33.540 Thank you, Jack, for having me on the show.

00:02:36.220 And you know what?

00:02:36.800 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.

00:02:42.940 We will.

00:02:44.000 We will.

00:02:44.960 And, of course, so, Marty, there's no question that folks out in the audience, for people saying, who's Marty O'Donnell?

00:02:53.420 Marty O'Donnell is, of course, the composer of the award-winning and best-selling video game series, the music for Halo.

00:03:03.480 That's right.

00:03:05.720 You know, the other thing is I've actually had two careers because I'm that old.

00:03:10.160 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.

00:03:20.620 That was you?

00:03:21.600 Some people.

00:03:22.460 Yeah, that was me.

00:03:24.040 Oh, my gosh.

00:03:25.580 You just unlocked a core memory for me here.

00:03:28.740 So it's your fault.

00:03:30.760 It's my fault.

00:03:31.620 Yeah, I put that melody into your head.

00:03:33.120 Those were actually good because I would beg my mom to get them because I couldn't get the song out of my head.

00:03:39.800 That was the goal.

00:03:41.960 I had the same goal with the monk chant, oh, to get that into people's heads so they would play Halo.

00:03:48.920 I mean, as a jingle guy, that's important.

00:03:51.020 Of course, as a Catholic, right, you know, it's just amazing to see Gregorian chant be put on such a platform like that.

00:03:59.360 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?

00:04:08.260 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.

00:04:25.160 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.

00:04:35.180 You know, we might sell a million units.

00:04:37.400 You know, that was that was we really expected it to be great.

00:04:41.080 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.

00:04:55.120 Or that somebody like President Trump would be using it as memes.

00:04:59.660 It's none of that stuff was expected.

00:05:02.640 Well, I was just going to get into that because, you know, here we are.

00:05:05.580 And I had done your show earlier this year.

00:05:09.080 And so, you know, we've kind of been chatting back and forth.

00:05:11.780 And then, you know, we were working to get you on trying to get schedules to sync up.

00:05:16.680 And lo and behold, then we have GameStop tweeting out that Trump has has ended the the console wars, the great, you know, Xbox, PlayStation, et cetera, console wars, Nintendo.

00:05:30.040 And and and then it just began this sort of meme explosion between GameStop and the White House and DHS of Trump and Halo mashup.

00:05:41.600 I mean, I think we have a couple of the memes, right, guys, throw some of those up for people who are watching.

00:05:47.680 I mean, just 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?

00:06:00.180 Well, it was it was surreal.

00:06:03.340 First of all, we had as a surprise, Microsoft is re-releasing Halo one pretty much in its entirety.

00:06:11.100 The original music, the original voices, the original story just upgraded up up res graphics next year.

00:06:20.220 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.

00:06:32.660 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,

00:06:41.360 because you knew that the the left was going to go insane and they wouldn't get the humor and it just kept going from there.

00:06:49.180 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.

00:06:58.260 And it was great timing. I loved it. It was once like I said, though, it was surreal.

00:07:03.100 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.

00:07:14.880 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.

00:07:24.340 Well, I think it's great, too. And in a sense, you know, not to not to get all into it, but there's you know, there's always been a lot of gamers in the MAGA community because it was it was gamers who very long time ago,

00:07:39.500 almost 11 years ago now, started calling out the lies of the gaming media and, you know, not to relitigate all that.

00:07:48.060 But, you know, they started they were sort of the first ones to say, hey, this do you have the word wokeness back then?

00:07:53.800 We called them SJWs, social justice warriors. And and said, hey, that, you know, they're trying to inject all of this politically correct nonsense into our games.

00:08:03.660 And we just want to play a great game. We just we just want to play be able to play Halo.

00:08:08.660 Yeah. Yeah. And I've always felt like the first what we called Gamergate was the the impetus for the sort of youthful conservative movement.

00:08:21.300 You know, I can't take credit for any of that, but I feel like, you know, the in the early 2000s and through the 2000s, most of us who were making video games were making games.

00:08:32.560 And our slogan was we want to make games that we want to play, which meant that we were gamers who loved playing games.

00:08:40.200 And so we were making games that we felt were cool and fun. And, you know, the the audience and you you kids responded really positive to that.

00:08:49.520 And then at some point in the, you know, 2012, 13, 14, someplace in there, definitely the the agendas started coming in from the corporate offices and the wokeness and the HR departments.

00:09:04.940 And suddenly, DEI started infecting how games were being made and how game studios were being put together.

00:09:11.460 And so you saw you saw it yourself, yourself working in the industry.

00:09:18.200 Yeah, I saw the beginning of it. Luckily, I hit I was I was you know, I was fired from Bungie, which is a whole other story in 2014, just before we released Destiny.

00:09:28.820 And that's a whole different subject. I wasn't fired because of wokeness and I wasn't fired because of my political beliefs.

00:09:35.120 It was it was a creative differences. But I did start to see it creeping in.

00:09:41.120 I started to see it creeping into how HR worked, how people were being hired as the studios got bigger and bigger.

00:09:48.680 I started my own studio after that with a with a friend who was in agreement with me about how studios should be run.

00:09:55.720 And we were able to do what we wanted to do. And that was fine.

00:09:58.280 But we did see it happening in some of the really big triple A studios that would have, you know, 800 to 1000 people that they'd hire.

00:10:07.140 And they were hiring people for the wrong reasons. And we saw it happening.

00:10:10.400 And we saw the game starting to be infected with which, you know, the SJW concepts, which turned into what I would call the woke mind virus.

00:10:20.280 So and it was a shame because it's it meant that the games were really no longer fun to play.

00:10:24.900 They were preachy. Well, and that's that was the biggest issue.

00:10:29.920 And and so it was, you know, it's it's a you know, you're right, though.

00:10:33.680 It was 2014, right around that era where, you know, this this whole thing exploded online.

00:10:40.080 I, you know, had an anonymous account myself at the time and, you know, kind of caught the caught wind of what was happening where, you know,

00:10:48.380 people on Twitter at the time were just firing up these these journalists and say, you guys are lying.

00:10:55.440 You're totally fake. You're pushing wokeness. 1.00

00:10:57.480 You're trying to destroy the things that we love and we're sick of it.

00:11:00.960 And that kind of nucleus and has really turned itself into the MAGA movement.

00:11:08.620 Now, funny of mine. And to be clear, mine was not from video games.

00:11:12.420 Mine. I was actually in kind of the Game of Thrones world back then.

00:11:16.540 Oh, that's a story. That's a story for another day.

00:11:20.900 I'll be right back. We're on with Marty O'Donnell.

00:11:23.540 Want to get back the legendary composer of Halo.

00:11:27.860 And he's running for Congress.

00:11:29.180 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,

00:11:56.580 but also the composer of the Halo series, Marty O'Donnell.

00:12:01.220 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.

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00:13:17.380 All right, back on with Marty O'Donnell.

00:13:19.780 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.

00:13:31.120 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.

00:13:39.340 Do you think that we're there yet or do you think it's still kind of lurking around?

00:13:43.940 Where do you think we're at?

00:13:44.920 I think it's going underground, I think, especially with the repudiation of the woke movement by the country voting for Donald Trump and, you know, changing the political climate.

00:14:02.340 It's wonderful to see these DEI programs go on, you know, go away.

00:14:07.120 But I don't think they're completely gone.

00:14:08.820 And I think we have to be pretty vigilant because they're just some of these HR departments are just kind of being renamed.

00:14:15.920 They rename it to something else.

00:14:17.780 So I think we have to keep stomping on this thing.

00:14:21.120 Meritocracy needs to be the rule of the day.

00:14:25.000 And so we have to stay on top of it and watch for when it pops its head up again.

00:14:30.680 Yeah, and that's that's always what it used to be, right?

00:14:32.900 It always used to be just the the best man, the best woman gets the job, whatever it is. 0.97

00:14:38.480 Don't care what the background is.

00:14:39.960 If we're all here to put together something, then we're just going to take the best of the best.

00:14:44.100 And there isn't going to be any question about that.

00:14:46.460 And somewhere along the line, you know, these wokeies got in and started saying, oh, no, you got to change your percentages.

00:14:52.500 And, you know, you can't have female characters that look like that, et cetera, et cetera. 1.00

00:14:56.580 And then and then inevitably it just ruins the product.

00:14:59.420 Yeah. And like I said, when when when I was making games, it was our slogan was we make games that we want to play.

00:15:07.300 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.

00:15:21.940 And I think people notice it all the companies that are making games because they have some sort of an agenda.

00:15:27.020 And the fans go, wait a minute, what happened to the fun?

00:15:30.140 What happened to the coolness?

00:15:31.440 Why am I being told to, you know, put my personal pronouns in my character or I mean, one of the worst things is when you you go to a character creation screen and it says body type one, body type two.

00:15:44.360 There's no male and female anymore.

00:15:46.180 And it's just every one of those little things is just a reminder of the agenda that these corporations have.

00:15:53.900 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.

00:16:02.800 It's exactly the plot of the series.

00:16:05.160 It's a war. 0.99

00:16:05.840 Well, you know, and the other thing, one of one of my favorite little slogans of Bungie had way back in the day was kill your enemies, kill your friends, kill your friends. 0.99

00:16:19.740 Well, and that's what it was.

00:16:20.940 I remember, you know, I remember playing those games and in the early days kind of really 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.

00:16:32.900 That was the you know, that was really the at the forefront.

00:16:36.400 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.

00:16:44.700 Yeah, you're all on the couch.

00:16:45.800 Exactly.

00:16:46.180 And that's what you're doing.

00:16:47.200 So, yes, absolutely.

00:16:48.220 I was, you know, killing my friends in Halo, in Halo and having a blast doing it and knowing that exactly serious.

00:16:56.680 There was nothing serious about it.

00:16:57.860 It was just a slightly more adult version of playing, you know, World War Two when you were a kid or playing Cowboys and Indians or whatever.

00:17:06.780 It was your friends.

00:17:07.840 Oh, we're getting canceled now.

00:17:09.040 I got to say that anymore.

00:17:10.000 Cowboys and Indians. 0.55

00:17:11.000 Yeah, I know.

00:17:11.600 I know.

00:17:12.040 Well, that's you know, it's funny you mentioned that total aside.

00:17:15.320 But my kids who are seven and four, they were like, they told me that a while ago now, but I said, what are you guys playing?

00:17:22.400 They said, we're playing Cowboys and Indians.

00:17:23.680 And I said, how do you guys know Cowboys and Indians? 0.99

00:17:26.060 And they're just like, that's what we play.

00:17:27.340 We play Cowboys.

00:17:28.020 I had never I had never said it to him.

00:17:30.760 I had never once said it.

00:17:32.480 But it's this 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.

00:17:42.720 But especially with young men, because, you know, even with, you know, a war game like this, military science fiction, because that's what young men have an innate and natural interest in.

00:17:56.680 Yeah.

00:17:57.260 And I have three grandsons.

00:17:58.960 I raised two daughters.

00:18:00.920 And by the way, both my daughters were somewhat interested in the games that I that I made and played, but they never got quite as addicted to it.

00:18:10.280 But my three grandsons are I can see it already.

00:18:13.700 They are they're just they're just different than daughters. 0.70

00:18:17.700 Right.

00:18:18.100 And so they're very interested in in in playing the kind of games that I made and like.

00:18:24.560 And that's fine.

00:18:25.200 You know, it's just that's just the way things are.

00:18:27.220 And there's an interesting.

00:18:28.620 Yeah.

00:18:29.140 There's an interesting phenomenon about, you know, things that kids do.

00:18:34.340 What kids pass on, what they're doing, their nursery rhymes with their their games to other kids and the parents are not involved.

00:18:40.420 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.

00:18:49.640 It's just that's why they're still playing cowboys and Indians. 0.98

00:18:53.800 So you're you're you're running for Congress.

00:18:56.640 You've you've switched that over.

00:18:58.440 Tell me a little bit about the race.

00:19:00.040 It's Nevada three.

00:19:01.260 Susie Lee, the Democrats in there.

00:19:03.260 It's a district that Trump won.

00:19:05.720 She only won by about 10,000 votes.

00:19:08.540 You're running 2026.

00:19:11.600 Walk us through it real quick.

00:19:12.660 Two minutes.

00:19:13.620 Yeah, sure.

00:19:14.680 I am very interested in in flipping this seat.

00:19:18.000 And so are the Republicans in in Washington.

00:19:22.660 Obviously, Susie Lee is just a mouthpiece, a rubber stamp for the Democrat Party. 1.00

00:19:28.500 I'm a lifelong conservative.

00:19:30.680 I'm a huge fan of President Trump and voted for him three times.

00:19:35.960 And I'm looking forward to being support in the midterms so that we hold the House and keep the Trump administration going for the full four years.

00:19:45.800 I'm also super interested in working, you know, to make sure that that our country can have it so that one good job is enough to raise a family.

00:19:57.860 And this we need to get back to the idea that you need one good job and you can raise a family.

00:20:04.080 You can you can, you know, 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.

00:20:14.580 And we need to get back to that sort of economic situation as soon as possible.

00:20:20.520 And I think President Trump and his administration is the way to do it.

00:20:25.080 Well, that's incredible.

00:20:26.080 Well, Marty, you've you've got my support because we know that we absolutely need fighters in there, someone who's seen wokeness from inside the belly of the beast, someone who understands what it's like to go up against that industry.

00:20:42.000 And by the way, be able to speak truth to power and someone who just gets it, someone who just absolutely gets it.

00:20:48.520 Where can people go to get more information, get involved in the race?

00:20:52.720 Go to Marty for Congress dot com.

00:20:56.280 You can also go to Marty for Congress dot vote.

00:20:58.320 Either one will take it to the exact same place.

00:21:00.680 And, you know, register.

00:21:02.420 You can contribute, of course, which is we need it because it's a national race and there's a lot of Democrat money is going to come in against me.

00:21:10.220 But just even just registering so I can keep in touch with you is is a wonderful thing.

00:21:15.180 So Marty for Congress dot com.

00:21:17.920 All right.

00:21:19.140 And what can I say?

00:21:21.400 What can I say?

00:21:22.720 Incredible interview.

00:21:23.620 Thank you so much.

00:21:24.440 Honored to have you here.

00:21:25.700 Ladies and gentlemen, as always, you have my permission to lay ashore.

Human Events Daily with Jack Posobiec - November 06, 2025

Exclusive Interview w⧸ Marty O'Donnell on GamerGate, Halo and the Wokeification of Video Games

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