Bungie's Marcus Lehto was grinning like a proud papa when we had a chance to chat with him during X10. The Halo: Reach creative director had been demoing his baby continually for around eight hours, but seemed excited just to be able to tell us more about the studio's final Halo game, his presentation of which had totally wowed us earlier in the day. We reached out, shook his hand, said Halo (okay, not really) and got cracking with our questions.

Joystiq: As a game that is intended to cap off Bungie's work on the Halo series, how do you end a story by going back to the beginning?

Marcus Lehto: What we wanted to do is kind of bring everything full circle. Going back -- to a prequel -- to delve into the stories of the Spartans on planet Reach and to tell their stories; What they did, what they did that transpired and led to the events of Halo 1, was such a cool thing for us to tackle. That's the thing that really got us excited about [Halo: Reach]. We came up with an amazing story tell tell.

For us, like I said, it does literally bring things full circle for us because we're doing things in Reach -- and telling this story -- that really help us encapsulate the entire series and make sense of everything.