Marty O'Donnell joins Human Events Daily to talk about his campaign for Congress, his career as a composer, and his love of Halo and Gregorian Chant. He also talks about how he went from being a jingle artist to becoming a composer in the digital entertainment space.
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00:02:08.560Very excited to have our next guest on today.
00:02:13.900He'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.
00:02:29.220Ladies and gentlemen, Marty O'Donnell joins Human Events Daily.
00:02:33.540Thank you, Jack, for having me on the show.
00:03:05.720You know, the other thing is I've actually had two careers because I'm that old.
00:03:10.160My first career was in doing television scores and jingles, and one of the jingles was, we are Flintstones, kids, 10 million strong and growing.
00:03:41.960I had the same goal with the monk chant, oh, to get that into people's heads so they would play Halo.
00:03:48.920I mean, as a jingle guy, that's important.
00:03:51.020Of course, as a Catholic, right, you know, it's just amazing to see Gregorian chant be put on such a platform like that.
00:03:59.360I 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?
00:04:08.260Yes, 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.
00:04:25.160That'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.
00:04:35.180You know, we might sell a million units.
00:04:37.400You know, that was that was we really expected it to be great.
00:04:41.080But 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.
00:04:55.120Or that somebody like President Trump would be using it as memes.
00:05:02.640Well, I was just going to get into that because, you know, here we are.
00:05:05.580And I had done your show earlier this year.
00:05:09.080And so, you know, we've kind of been chatting back and forth.
00:05:11.780And then, you know, we were working to get you on trying to get schedules to sync up.
00:05:16.680And 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.
00:05:30.040And and and then it just began this sort of meme explosion between GameStop and the White House and DHS of Trump and Halo mashup.
00:05:41.600I mean, I think we have a couple of the memes, right, guys, throw some of those up for people who are watching.
00:05:47.680I 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?
00:06:03.340First of all, we had as a surprise, Microsoft is re-releasing Halo one pretty much in its entirety.
00:06:11.100The original music, the original voices, the original story just upgraded up up res graphics next year.
00:06:20.220So 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.
00:06:32.660And 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,
00:06:41.360because 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.
00:06:49.180And 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.
00:06:58.260And it was great timing. I loved it. It was once like I said, though, it was surreal.
00:07:03.100Like 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.
00:07:14.880It'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.
00:07:24.340Well, 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,
00:07:39.500almost 11 years ago now, started calling out the lies of the gaming media and, you know, not to relitigate all that.
00:07:48.060But, you know, they started they were sort of the first ones to say, hey, this do you have the word wokeness back then?
00:07:53.800We 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.
00:08:03.660And we just want to play a great game. We just we just want to play be able to play Halo.
00:08:08.660Yeah. Yeah. And I've always felt like the first what we called Gamergate was the the impetus for the sort of youthful conservative movement.
00:08:21.300You 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.
00:08:32.560And our slogan was we want to make games that we want to play, which meant that we were gamers who loved playing games.
00:08:40.200And 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.
00:08:49.520And 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.
00:09:04.940And suddenly, DEI started infecting how games were being made and how game studios were being put together.
00:09:11.460And so you saw you saw it yourself, yourself working in the industry.
00:09:18.200Yeah, 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.
00:09:28.820And that's a whole different subject. I wasn't fired because of wokeness and I wasn't fired because of my political beliefs.
00:09:35.120It was it was a creative differences. But I did start to see it creeping in.
00:09:41.120I started to see it creeping into how HR worked, how people were being hired as the studios got bigger and bigger.
00:09:48.680I started my own studio after that with a with a friend who was in agreement with me about how studios should be run.
00:09:55.720And we were able to do what we wanted to do. And that was fine.
00:09:58.280But 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.
00:10:07.140And they were hiring people for the wrong reasons. And we saw it happening.
00:10:10.400And 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.
00:10:20.280So and it was a shame because it's it meant that the games were really no longer fun to play.
00:10:24.900They were preachy. Well, and that's that was the biggest issue.
00:10:29.920And and so it was, you know, it's it's a you know, you're right, though.
00:10:33.680It was 2014, right around that era where, you know, this this whole thing exploded online.
00:10:40.080I, 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,
00:10:48.380people on Twitter at the time were just firing up these these journalists and say, you guys are lying.
00:11:29.180All 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,
00:11:56.580but also the composer of the Halo series, Marty O'Donnell.
00:12:01.220And 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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00:13:17.380All right, back on with Marty O'Donnell.
00:13:19.780And 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.
00:13:31.120There'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.
00:13:39.340Do you think that we're there yet or do you think it's still kind of lurking around?
00:13:44.920I 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.
00:14:02.340It's wonderful to see these DEI programs go on, you know, go away.
00:14:07.120But I don't think they're completely gone.
00:14:08.820And I think we have to be pretty vigilant because they're just some of these HR departments are just kind of being renamed.
00:14:39.960If we're all here to put together something, then we're just going to take the best of the best.
00:14:44.100And there isn't going to be any question about that.
00:14:46.460And somewhere along the line, you know, these wokeies got in and started saying, oh, no, you got to change your percentages.
00:14:52.500And, you know, you can't have female characters that look like that, et cetera, et cetera.
00:14:56.580And then and then inevitably it just ruins the product.
00:14:59.420Yeah. And like I said, when when when I was making games, it was our slogan was we make games that we want to play.
00:15:07.300And 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.
00:15:21.940And I think people notice it all the companies that are making games because they have some sort of an agenda.
00:15:27.020And the fans go, wait a minute, what happened to the fun?
00:15:31.440Why 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.
00:15:46.180And it's just every one of those little things is just a reminder of the agenda that these corporations have.
00:15:53.900Oh, 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.
00:16:05.840Well, 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.
00:16:20.940I 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.
00:16:32.900That was the you know, that was really the at the forefront.
00:16:36.400It was it was getting your friends, you know, three, four friends together in one evening and having a party and lighting each other up.
00:16:57.860It 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.
00:17:32.480But 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.
00:17:42.720But 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.
00:18:00.920And 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.
00:18:10.280But my three grandsons are I can see it already.
00:18:13.700They are they're just they're just different than daughters.
00:18:29.140There's an interesting phenomenon about, you know, things that kids do.
00:18:34.340What kids pass on, what they're doing, their nursery rhymes with their their games to other kids and the parents are not involved.
00:18:40.420So 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.
00:18:49.640It's just that's why they're still playing cowboys and Indians.
00:18:53.800So you're you're you're running for Congress.
00:19:30.680I'm a huge fan of President Trump and voted for him three times.
00:19:35.960And 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.
00:19:45.800I'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.
00:19:57.860And this we need to get back to the idea that you need one good job and you can raise a family.
00:20:04.080You 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.
00:20:14.580And we need to get back to that sort of economic situation as soon as possible.
00:20:20.520And I think President Trump and his administration is the way to do it.
00:20:26.080Well, 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.
00:20:42.000And by the way, be able to speak truth to power and someone who just gets it, someone who just absolutely gets it.
00:20:48.520Where can people go to get more information, get involved in the race?
00:21:02.420You 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.
00:21:10.220But just even just registering so I can keep in touch with you is is a wonderful thing.