Composer of ‘Halo’ soundtrack running for Congress after years of complaining about wokeness in video games

Marty O’Donnell, composer of the scores for the popular video games series Halo and Destiny and an outspoken opponent of “wokeness” in gaming, is running for Congress in Nevada’s 3rd congressional district for the second time.

O’Donnell, 70, previously ran in the same district last year but finished fourth in the Republican Party primary, having campaigned on a platform of family values and border security. He will be hoping to improve on that at next year’s midterms.

Discussing his second bid for Washington in a guest post on the DEIDetected blog Tuesday, a site dedicated to opposing political correctness in video games, the musician said he believes politics and entertainment are intimately connected and that DEI initiatives have spoiled too many games, an issue Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth have taken on at the federal level.

“I believe the enthusiasm for the re-release of the original Halo is in large part due to the woke-ification of the gaming industry,” he wrote. “After years of gamers fighting the infiltration of DEI in the industry, we are finally winning.”

O’Donnell continued: “I saw firsthand the beginning of DEI in the industry. Instead of hiring people who played video games, corporations began requiring ‘diversity’ at the expense of game quality.

“The corporate demand of hiring quotas meant more and more employees in charge of creating games not only didn’t play games, they didn’t even like video games and they certainly didn’t understand the audience.”

He went on to list specific examples of “disastrous” gestures towards inclusively, complaining that the Halo character Master Chief had been reduced to “a weak, self-doubting shell of the character that made him” and complained about the option to play as trans characters in other games like Dragon Age: The Veilguard and Call of Duty.

“It’s hard for gamers to immerse themselves in a game when they are required to choose a ‘body type’ instead of gender and provide pronouns for their character at the start,” he argued.

O’Donnell also called out the Sony game Concord as “riddled with woke nonsense such as progressive characters and pronouns” before, surprisingly, comparing its “utter failure” to the outcome of the 2024 presidential election.

“I don’t think it is a coincidence that Concord crashed and burned two months before Donald Trump was re-elected to the White House,” he said.

“The downfall of DEI in gaming feels very similar to the 2024 elections. At the same time that gamers fought and took back the gaming industry from woke leftists, voters fought and took back our country from woke leftists.”

His comments about the growing crossover between U.S. politics and mass culture echo similar sentiments expressed by the South Park creators, Trey Parker and Matt Stone, this week. The Trump administration has inadvertently given the long-running Comedy Central show a new lease of life.

“It’s not that we got all political,” Parker told The New York Times. “It’s that politics became pop culture.”

The Nevada district O’Donnell is contesting was narrowly won by Trump in last year’s election on a 50 percent to 49 percent vote, but is represented by a Democrat in the Senate, Jacky Rosen.

The Republican primary in which the composer was defeated last year was won by political analyst Drew Johnson, who went on to lose to Democratic incumbent congresswoman Susie Lee in a 51.4 percent to 48.6 percent vote.

O’Donnell has taken his message to conservative media and was recently interviewed by Jack Posobiec on Real America’s Voice. He also regularly discusses politics on X and most recently called on Rep. Lee to join moderate Democrats in backing a Republican continuing resolution to end the record-breaking government shutdown.