Cortana/Cortana Letters - Character Design

Character Design

In an interview, female Bungie artist Lorraine McLees stated that game designers are generally men, and "women in their games are perhaps portrayed in the way they themselves see women. Here, the same 3-D artist who wanted to not portray women as sex objects coincidentally, modeled Cortana." Cortana's original Halo model was based on the Egyptian Queen Nefertiti.

Voice actress Jen Taylor said that she remained somewhat distanced from the character, and attended only one fan convention in six years after the release of Halo: Combat Evolved. Despite her role in voicing other video game characters, including Princess Peach, she is not a gamer. She felt that portraying Cortana was occasionally challenging because the character lacks a physical form and is "a computer". Interviewed about Cortana in Halo 3, Taylor said that "There’s a lot more drama and a lot less technical jargon this time around. I actually just finished a couple of lines that nearly had me in tears." When choosing a voice actor for the character, Bungie originally wanted Cortana to have a British accent. Although this idea was later discarded, Cortana still uses British colloquialisms in Halo: Combat Evolved.

Halo Effect: An Unauthorized Look at the Most Successful Video Game of All Time, an essay on references to mythology in Halo and previous Bungie games, analyzed the significance of Cortana's name, stating is a variant of Curtana, the sword used by the legendary Ogier the Dane, just as the titular AI character of Marathon 2: Durandal is apparently named after another legendary sword, Durendal. Curtana's inscription reveals that the sword has the same "temper as Joyeuse and Durendal". Accordingly, it speculated before the release of Halo 3 whether the "smart" Cortana would follow Marathon's Durandal in succumbing to rampancy, a concept invented by Bungie in which an AI character becomes insane by gaining too much knowledge.