Halo Mongoose - Weta Style

The Halo universe is one that we here at Weta have been fortunate enough to visit on several occasions.

The famous suite of video games from Microsoft has given us some awesome sci-fi projects to work on.

First there was the Warthog off-road vehicle, props, weapons and costumes for the launch of Halo 3 in 2007

That was closely followed by our line of Halo collectibles

And last year, Microsoft got in touch again. 

For a joint promotion to launch the latest Halo instalment - Halo Reach - Microsoft and Mountain Dew devised a campaign on the theme "Honor The Code". And they wanted to create two amazing prizes - two fully functional, high performance quad bikes. But not just any quad bikes, of course. Mongooses as seen in the Halo Reach game.

As soon as the rumour spread through the workshop, people lined up to be part of it.

A different set of challenges 

Weta co-owner and creative director Richard Taylor says: "It's a little bit different to build a vehicle that a person will own and cherish for years. When we build vehicles for movies, they only need to survive the length of the shoot and we're there to do touch-ups etc. While they are built to handle the rigours on set, only the functions vital to the scenes in the movie really need to be considered. We usually go beyond that, but there are always features that just need to look good."

"When we build a fully functional vehicle that someone might want to use, we need to think of everything that the owner might want to do. People probably won't want to thrash these very valuable Mongooses around on a mud track, but whether they're kept in a garage or someone's lounge, they will be studied in detail by the owners and their friends and families and they have to be perfect".

When handed the brief, Weta design engineer Peter Osborne soon decided the way to go was to purchase two brand new 420cc quad bikes from Honda. They had very nearly the right proportions for a Mongoose build. Very nearly, but not quite.

In the Chop Shop 

The chassis was lowered and lengthened and the steering column was shortened to achieve the aggressive stance of the Mongoose.

Most things were either altered or moved, although most of the mechanical components are still Honda. Peter smiles when asked if the Mongooses could still be serviced by your local Honda mechanic: "Yeah, theoretically. It's mostly Honda parts, but as we've moved stuff around and added some dressing that's functional and some that isn't, I'd love to be a fly on the wall when he tries to figure it all out."

The switchgear and instruments are original, but blue and yellow LEDs have been added to add to the futuristic look. The head and tail lights are a combination of LEDs and halogen - again to match the designs from Microsoft.

The exoskeletal frame was fabricated from elliptic section steel tube and took four whole days just to weld - this is an important part as much of the frame is exposed on the final vehicle.