History of Mister Chief

Mister Chief is a character created by the former-Bungie employee Frank O'Connor which is meant to be a poorly-drawn Master Chief from the Halo franchise. Mister Chief was first drawn on January 16th, 2004, holding a lightsaber because "guns are hard to draw. Lightsabers are as easy as snakes." The character was heavily featured in Bungie Weekly Updates, which gave updates on Halo 2's development. Most updates contained a drawing of Mister Chief in some wacky scenario, and all of the updates along with the Mister Chief "art" can still be viewed here.

After the Weekly Updates, Mister Chief was drawn a lot less, but still showed up for the occasional Easter egg. In 2008, as an April Fools' Prank, Bungie drew Mister Chief's face on the Halo 3 population map.

In October 2013, Mister Chief was added as an Xbox Live Avatar item that people could buy for $3 to make their avatar look like him.

On May 28th, 2014, he was included as a skin in the Halo Mash-Up pack for the Xbox 360. The greatest Minecraft skin ever created, in fact.

On September 17, 2015, they disgraced Mister Chief by using him to advertise a shitty pay to win system in Halo 5 known as the Requisition system, which literally allowed played to buy in-game vehicles and gameplay advantages with real money.

On November 26th, 2019, Mister Chief was added to CSGO as a sticker.

In 2021, a "Mariner" helmet was added to Halo Reach in the Master Chief Collection. This helmet had a variant with Mister Chief's face scratched on the visor, which was only unlockable by assassinating an Elite to negate fall damage, which was pretty tricky.

Later in the year in December, he was also added as an AI in Halo Infinite, which is Mister Chief's last official Halo appearance to date as far as I know.

My History with Mister Chief

I discovered Mister Chief through the aforementioned 2014 Xbox 360 Halo Mash-Up pack. I used to always wear a slime skin, but I switched to the superior skin pretty early in my Minecraft career. Using him as my skin caused me to look into Mister Chief more, which is what would lead to me using him as my profile picture and avatar on just about everything now. I specifically use this fat-looking picture of Mister Chief for a lot of things, which people have told me looks like a ninja turtle.

A few of my friends have made their own edits of Mister Chief, although my brother is responsible for most of them. Most of the edits of Mister Chief in my collection were made a few years ago, probably around 2021, and I still use them to this day for profile pictures and Discord Server icons. Just recently, I hosted a server icon event on my Discord Server, to which one of the server members, John, won with a Beer-drinking Mister Chief.

I also participated in the limited-time Halo Master Chief challenge to unlock the Mister Chief Mariner helmet variant, which, might I say, really completes my Halo Reach Spartan's look.

Mister Chief is a terrible idea that snowballed out of control, and now we’re stuck with it, like the internal combustion engine or Justin Bieber. I don’t secretly think he’s awesome, nor do I secretly think that Mister Chief has any actual artistic or canonical merit. He is the bastard child of a more desperate time. You know the expression “outsider art?” Whereby art is created from an unexpected place, like an elephant with a paintbrush. A French artist, Jean Dubuffet coined the term to describe paintings made by children and the inmates of insane asylums. Well, that’s exactly what Mister Chief is.

— Frank O'Connor