Riding in Warthogs with boys

Atomic goes for a ride in Weta Workshop's life-size, working Warthog. It's a Halo fanboi's dream come true...

A few weeks ago, we got to boat on over to Cockatoo Islands for an exclusive first look at the upcoming Halo 3:ODST. The game's looking great, but we were just as excited by the prospect of seeing - and getting a ride in - the awesome Warthog jeep made by Weta Workship. It, and a very impressive 'crash landing' set, had been shipped over to Sydney for the event.

First things first. In case you're not aware of why Weta - renowned effects house behind the Lord of the Rings films - is making a Warthog, check out this clip.

This is a short film made by Neil Blomkamp - the auteur behind District 9 - and the Weta Workshop team, back when a Halo movie was on the cards. Due to studio wrangling, that film will now likely never happen. Sure, we got D9 instead, but we can only dream about how cool Halo would have been on the big screen.

And, if you're lucky, you might get to drive around in the only surviving Warthog made for the teaser shorts.

And this is a fully working vehicle, make no mistake. A Weta technician was on hand, so I grilled him on the 'hog's construction.

"It's based off a Nissan Pathfinder, roughly," he told me. "We took some CAD drawings of a Pathfinder, and then overlaid a 1-1 scale Warthog over that to work out what bits we had to cut off, and how we could best map it to the car's chassis."

The end result of the cutting and chopping is an awesomely sturdy and practical vehicle. "Yeah, it was a real tough build, and we get a lot of requests from people to build them one to order. That would cost about $200,000," he adds, "'cause we'd need to re-do all the moulds for the bodywork."