The Complete, Untold History of Halo

[Megalith]

Did you know that Microsoft actually hated the “Halo” name because it wasn’t combat or Master Chief focused and went back and forth with Bungie for months until they settled on the “Combat Evolved” subtitle? How about the fact that multiplayer was almost cut because it was broken until right before release? Here is a longish but interesting read for those of you like me who still consider the first Halo as one of the best FPS games ever made.

The original Halo: Combat Evolved may not have been the first home attempt at the genre, but it was arguably the most important. As close as its inspirational competition could get, the likes of Medal of Honor, Quake II and GoldenEye, none which I was ever that great at, felt comparative years behind. Bungie followed the unlikely lead of Argonaut Games’ Alien Resurrection, which mapped moving and aiming onto separate analog sticks over a year before the Xbox launched. That precedent aside, though, the Bellevue-based studio set the standards for the modern shooter genre almost singlehandedly.

 

[sabrewolf732]

meh i thought it was pretty mediocre. I want to say I played it around 2003ish and half life 2 blew it out of the water.

 

[Dan]

Halo was a religion for my friends and I. Will read this tonight

 

[BigJayDogg3]

meh i thought it was pretty mediocre. I want to say I played it around 2003ish and half life 2 blew it out of the water.

Meh. Half Life 2 was boring. I'll take Halo 10 times out of 10, and 12 if I have system link.

Halo is one of the few games I played the campaign multiple times.

 

[Vader1975]

I almost lost my coffee on my desk when I read best FPS ever made... with a console controller? WTH.

 

[Vercinaigh]

Meh. Half Life 2 was boring. I'll take Halo 10 times out of 10, and 12 if I have system link.

Halo is one of the few games I played the campaign multiple times.

Not judging it's single player here as all I played was multiplayer competitive games but i found it to be garbage, broken and very easily exploited, but that's me. All my friends liked it and despite playing months more than me I still crushed them using the very exploity natures I tried to explain to them. I never was told if Halo was all that for it's story alone or not, but if for it's multiplayer...people needed to play other games..

 

[Krazy925]

Halo1 was the best cause of that OP pistol. Hang em high.

Goldeneye was totally better doe.

 

[Mivoc]

I almost lost my coffee on my desk when I read best FPS ever made... with a console controller? WTH.

I think Megalith forgot what site he was posting to.

 

[zkostik]

meh i thought it was pretty mediocre. I want to say I played it around 2003ish and half life 2 blew it out of the water.

That was my thought, I did play it when it first came out on PC though. It was pretty flat and forgettable though. I never finished the Xbox version which I had first and for the time, it did look great for console standards. By PC standards, graphics were pretty bad, performance was terrible, single player okay, MP was a joke comparing to other MP games such as CS, UT, Quake 3 and various mods, etc. IMHO the game is pretty average at best, I really don't understand what all the rage and excitement is/was about it.

 

[Vader1975]

I think Megalith forgot what site he was posting to.

When I read "the Bellevue-based studio set the standards for the modern shooter genre almost singlehandedly" I was like ID and EPIC and Digital Illusions CE are in Bellevue?
On top of that, I remember all the console kids going nuts about SOCOM much more than HALO back in 2002.

 

[Aireoth]

People have the strangest rose colored glasses. Halo was fantastic for it's day, Half Life 2 came out 3 years after Halo did, which puts it in competition with Halo 2 not Halo. Pretty much all I see here is a bunch of people that played it late and said, meh not that good. If you played it in 2001, it was, Halo literally redefined the console FPS with its control scheme.

Yes it was exploit ridden, but apart from Golden Eye I haven't had more fun with a couch FPS.

 

[HeadRusch]

Halo/Destiny is the FPS for drinkers "who just like to get drunk!". Budweiser? Ethanol? Aftershave? All the same......give em 3 guns and floaty bunny hops in sterile, non-interactive and non-destructible environments and they're happy. The 90's never Die.

 

[NickJames]

Not judging it's single player here as all I played was multiplayer competitive games but i found it to be garbage, broken and very easily exploited, but that's me. All my friends liked it and despite playing months more than me I still crushed them using the very exploity natures I tried to explain to them. I never was told if Halo was all that for it's story alone or not, but if for it's multiplayer...people needed to play other games..

It's still one of the best mutliplayer console shooters of all time. As for exploits, that's what made it fun. Glitching outside the map, grenade jumping, rocket lunging, vehicle base blocking, all this is what made Halo fun. Playing on XBConnect/Gamespy Arcade 4v4 was some of the best days I ever had as a kid playing with my cousins against 4 randoms on this virtual LAN before Xbox Live. It was a simple shooter, run around, pick up guns, get good. Not like Halo now a days with it's loadouts and unlocks and all that shit. I hate todays shooters, nothing is simple anymore.

 

[nysmo]

I almost lost my coffee on my desk when I read best FPS ever made... with a console controller? WTH.

The only reason Halo gets so much credit is because it was simply at the right place at the right time. Until the xbox was released consoles werent really considered FPS ready. Xbox proved consoles were finally ready. But absolutely nothing about halo was in any way groundbreaking or revolutionary, except for the masses who had never even heard of a FPS.

 

[ianken]

And then MSFT let Bungie get away because they didn't have the imagination to consider that hey, maybe there could be some other game other than Halo.

The only reason Halo gets so much credit is because it was simply at the right place at the right time. Until the xbox was released consoles werent really considered FPS ready. Xbox proved consoles were finally ready. But absolutely nothing about halo was in any way groundbreaking or revolutionary, except for the masses who had never even heard of a FPS.

Oh please. That's some PCMR bullshit right there. Halo got props for being a decent FPS, on console that also tried tot tell some sort of story beyond the juvenile Duke 3D (steals all memorable lines from Evil Dead) and Doom (Oh look, gibs).

 

[ianken]

Halo/Destiny is the FPS for drinkers "who just like to get drunk!". Budweiser? Ethanol? Aftershave? All the same......give em 3 guns and floaty bunny hops in sterile, non-interactive and non-destructible environments and they're happy. The 90's never Die.

And the alternative is what? CSGO? Overwatch (talk about bunny hops). I'm sorry you can't handle movement in more than two dimensions. Maybe stick with doom on DOS?

 

[Scizyr]

The 5.1 surround in Halo 1 was pretty great, That's all I can remember liking about it. I remember being pissed that I couldn't play co-op multiplayer over lan and the fact that the campaign was only half finished, with the latter half of the game being 100% backtracking. I also remember being disappointed with how easy the game was on the hardest difficulty.

Tribes was king around the time this game was released, hence why the Bungie developers referred to it as "the Tribes killer." The entire Halo franchise couldn't hold a candle to Tribes 1.

 

[Vader1975]

The only reason Halo gets so much credit is because it was simply at the right place at the right time. Until the xbox was released consoles werent really considered FPS ready. Xbox proved consoles were finally ready. But absolutely nothing about halo was in any way groundbreaking or revolutionary, except for the masses who had never even heard of a FPS.

Well said sir well said.

I also think XBOXers were a different type of console gamer. They tended toward sports games and things like that and the PS2 had fighting games and RPG's and single player action games and the audience wasn't quite the same on the Playstation. So the new gamers that got onboard the sports game craze on the XBOX also found HALO and went nuts like it was a brand new idea. While us oldtimers were laughing because Bungie had made the game for PC before Microsoft bought them out and changed the direction. I still have the original pre-Microsoft Bungie Halo demo disc. It didn't say "combat evolved" or anything like that on it either. We had been playing FPS for years and still tooled around Wolfenstein 3D and DOOM and Quake and Unreal and UT and the new Battlefield 1942 and of course Counterstrike was in the early hayday of what version hmm 1.4 around then?

 

[nysmo]

Oh please. That's some PCMR bullshit right there. Halo got props for being a decent FPS, on console that also tried tot tell some sort of story beyond the juvenile Duke 3D (steals all memorable lines from Evil Dead) and Doom (Oh look, gibs).

I didnt say Halo was a bad game. It has already been mentioned that it is a PC port, so had it not been for MS's intervention this game would have stood next to Quake and probably done quite well for itself in that ecosystem. I never even owned an xbox, but I played the PC demo and could tell that it looked like a pretty decent game that I would have enjoyed. I'm just saying as a FPS it brought nothing new to the table other then perhaps a well defined story. It was already clear at the time that online multiplayer was a core tenant to any FPS and Bungie almost delivered without this very crucial component to the game, which kinda shows that they were more behind the curve than ahead of it.

I just mean to suggest that Halo delivered a PC calibre FPS experience to the console world which was a first. To them it was groundbreaking, and that was a huge segment of the gaming population that had never been exposed to this kind of gameplay before, just like I about lost my shit the first time I saw real life opponents moving around in Doom on DWANGO servers back in the 90's.

 

[M76]

meh i thought it was pretty mediocre. I want to say I played it around 2003ish and half life 2 blew it out of the water.

Pretty much this. For me Halo was just one game among many. It didn't stand out from the masses of FPS games being released around that time. I finished it, but back then I finished any game I could get my hands on. It didn't really leave a mark on me. There were many other games that I remember more fondly.

 

[DrBorg]

I never played any of the halo games; I was too busy playing Duke3d, then Quake2, then Q3A...

 

[krotch]

Did you know that Microsoft actually hated the “Halo” name because it wasn’t combat or Master Chief focused and went back and forth with Bungie for months until they settled on the “Combat Evolved” subtitle? How about the fact that multiplayer was almost cut because it was broken until right before release? Here is a longish but interesting read for those of you like me who still consider the first Halo as one of the best FPS games ever made.

The original Halo: Combat Evolved may not have been the first home attempt at the genre, but it was arguably the most important. As close as its inspirational competition could get, the likes of Medal of Honor, Quake II and GoldenEye, none which I was ever that great at, felt comparative years behind. Bungie followed the unlikely lead of Argonaut Games’ Alien Resurrection, which mapped moving and aiming onto separate analog sticks over a year before the Xbox launched. That precedent aside, though, the Bellevue-based studio set the standards for the modern shooter genre almost singlehandedly.

Are people misreading? One of the best, not...the best. If you had a top 10 list of FPS games that came out during the time Halo came out (end of 2001). Halo would be in that list.

 

[kju1]

TFA sucks. I was hoping for more than just a collection of quotes...

 

[GameLifter]

I consider the Halo series my favorite game series of all time. I love how the games focus on the combat and that they have more dynamic AI than most shooters. Halo was also the first game I played where you could seamlessly enter and exit vehicles and the vehicle combat is a blast.The first Halo was and is still amazing to me but it had flaws that were corrected in later releases. My favorite is still Halo: Reach but all of the Halo games are fun, well put together games.

 

[Hornet]

There are some things I like about Halo, especially the setting.

But the single player maps gets repetitive sometimes.

 

[tetris42]

I almost lost my coffee on my desk when I read best FPS ever made... with a console controller? WTH.

It's one of the best FPS's ever made.... for a console. Some people think that's the same thing as one of the best FPS's made.

People have the strangest rose colored glasses. Halo was fantastic for it's day, Half Life 2 came out 3 years after Halo did, which puts it in competition with Halo 2 not Halo. Pretty much all I see here is a bunch of people that played it late and said, meh not that good. If you played it in 2001, it was, Halo literally redefined the console FPS with its control scheme.

And then MSFT let Bungie get away because they didn't have the imagination to consider that hey, maybe there could be some other game other than Halo.

Oh please. That's some PCMR bullshit right there. Halo got props for being a decent FPS, on console that also tried tot tell some sort of story beyond the juvenile Duke 3D (steals all memorable lines from Evil Dead) and Doom (Oh look, gibs).

If you had played other FPS's, Halo was okay, but nothing amazing. If all you had was a console, it likely seemed the most amazing thing you had seen. People's reactions to it were similar to what Quake was for PC users; being a competent online FPS, which in itself carried a lot of appeal.

Halo took bits and pieces from other games and made it a competent launch title on a new console. If you had been gaming on PC for the past 10 years, it was nothing special. I mean we had Tribes 1 + 2 by that point, System Shock 2, Deus Ex, Half-Life, Unreal Tournament, Quake 3, Serious Sam, No One Lives Forever, Return to Castle Wolfenstein, Aliens v. Predator, Counter-Strike, all BEFORE Halo. Halo was amazing to people who hadn't played many FPSs, that's about all there was to it. For everyone else, it was just okay. On the contrary, I remember thinking it was some real bullshit design that they led you through these 90 degree hallways onto a ship, then had to go all the way BACK out.

Take almost any individual aspect of Halo, the gameplay, the story, innovation, the action, the mechanics, and it had already been done better by FPSs that came before it EXCEPT for playing with a gamepad. THAT'S what was remarkable about Halo, it was tuned for console play more than any other FPS that came prior. Just about everything else was okay, but nothing special for a FPS enthusiast.

Halo was only amazing and the best FPS ever if you were ignorant of what came before it.

 

[DarkLegacy]

I almost lost my coffee on my desk when I read best FPS ever made... with a console controller? WTH.

I've never been a fan of the franchise myself but the claim of " one of the best FPS games ever made " is very hard to dispute. It's one of the best selling franchises in video game history. Second best selling FPS game in history with only COD selling better than it. Have to consider how many platforms COD games have been on as well. At its peak, it was the most played online game in the world. I remember how much cross marketing Halo 3 had. Couldn't walk a block in NYC without seeing some form of Halo advertising lol. It deserves its place as one of the best FPS games of all time.

 

[Dan_D]

I liked the look of the game but wasn't going to buy an XBOX over it. I didn't get into Halo until after the first game was ported to the PC. I played the shit out of that game. I bought the second one for PC and was disappointed by the horrible port and the GFWL bullshit that went with it. I gave up on it and never played Halo 2 until it was re-released as part of the MasterChief Collection on XBOX One.

 

[lostinseganet]

i want the unfinished game. I want to be able to walk around in it, and have it tell me stories of what could have been. Check out the The Document of Metal Gear Solid 2 for inspiration.

 

[{NG}Fidel]

Well said sir well said.

I also think XBOXers were a different type of console gamer. They tended toward sports games and things like that and the PS2 had fighting games and RPG's and single player action games and the audience wasn't quite the same on the Playstation. So the new gamers that got onboard the sports game craze on the XBOX also found HALO and went nuts like it was a brand new idea. While us oldtimers were laughing because Bungie had made the game for PC before Microsoft bought them out and changed the direction. I still have the original pre-Microsoft Bungie Halo demo disc. It didn't say "combat evolved" or anything like that on it either. We had been playing FPS for years and still tooled around Wolfenstein 3D and DOOM and Quake and Unreal and UT and the new Battlefield 1942 and of course Counterstrike was in the early hayday of what version hmm 1.4 around then?

My XBOX and my countless hours of DOA3/Morrowind tend to disagree with you.

 

[KazeoHin]

Halo pretty much invented the modern FPS. Ive posted this several times, but it bears repeating. You may not like the changes that Halo inspired, but you can't argue that it did them first.

A two-weapon swap system: forcing players to plan ahead instead of memorizing hotkeys.

An instant-melee button: forcing players to keep their distance and be able to strike an unsuspecting enemy with a single click... instead of memorizing hotkeys.

An instant-grenade button: allowing players to utilise grenades more naturally and giving more options for any given situation... instead of memorizing hotkeys.

A recharging shield system, essentially meaning that if you don't kill the enemy in one fight, you still have a formidable foe if you let your guard down. On top of that, map control was more about strategic sightlines than pickup spawns.

Not all of these are inherently good. But Halo did them well and was the first time any game had all these features and more, and it worked.

The new DOOM even adopts instant melee and instant grenades, and it is heralded as the love song to oldschool shooters. Halo changed the FPS.

 

[{NG}Fidel]

Halo pretty much invented the modern FPS. Ive posted this several times, but it bears repeating. You may not like the changes that Halo inspired, but you can't argue that it did them first.

A two-weapon swap system: forcing players to plan ahead instead of memorizing hotkeys.

An instant-melee button: forcing players to keep their distance and be able to strike an unsuspecting enemy with a single click... instead of memorizing hotkeys.

An instant-grenade button: allowing players to utilise grenades more naturally and giving more options for any given situation... instead of memorizing hotkeys.

A recharging shield system, essentially meaning that if you don't kill the enemy in one fight, you still have a formidable foe if you let your guard down. On top of that, map control was more about strategic sightlines than pickup spawns.

Not all of these are inherently good. But Halo did them well and was the first time any game had all these features and more, amd it worked.

The new DOOM even adopts instant melee and instant grenades, and it is heralded as the love song to oldschool shooters. Halo changed the FPS.

I am not sure about those but I will attest that Halo did them exceptionally well.

 

[MavericK]

It was good for a console FPS. That's about it.

 

[MavericK]

Oh please. That's some PCMR bullshit right there. Halo got props for being a decent FPS, on console that also tried tot tell some sort of story beyond the juvenile Duke 3D (steals all memorable lines from Evil Dead) and Doom (Oh look, gibs).

Can't really take you seriously if you're gonna shit on Duke 3D and Doom.

Pretty much all I see here is a bunch of people that played it late and said, meh not that good. If you played it in 2001, it was, Halo literally redefined the console FPS with its control scheme.

Console FPS, sure. You'd think think it revolutionized the FPS genre with the amount of circle-jerking going on over it, though. There were numerous PC FPSes that did the same things it did, before it (and better).

 

[KazeoHin]

Can't really take you seriously if you're gonna shit on Duke 3D and Doom.



Console FPS, sure. You'd think think it revolutionized the FPS genre with the amount of circle-jerking going on over it, though. There were numerous PC FPSes that did the same things it did, before it (and better).

I see it the exact opposite. Most PC users shat on Halo because it was on console, without ever playing it. I was big into the UT and Quake 2 multiplayer communities when I first played Halo and I loved it. I still wanted to play UT2K3 when it came out, but I also held regular Halo LANs.

Also, what games did what Halo did prior?

 

[MavericK]

I see it the exact opposite. Most PC users shat on Halo because it was on console, without ever playing it. I was big into the UT and Quake 2 multiplayer communities when I first played Halo and I loved it. I still wanted to play UT2K3 when it came out, but I also held regular Halo LANs.

Also, what games did what Halo did prior?

I did play it. It was good for a console game, as I said.

Also...Doom, Quake, Unreal, UT, Tribes...etc.

 

[tetris42]

Halo pretty much invented the modern FPS. Ive posted this several times, but it bears repeating. You may not like the changes that Halo inspired, but you can't argue that it did them first.

Except when they obviously didn't:

A two-weapon swap system: forcing players to plan ahead instead of memorizing hotkeys.

You mean like Counter-Strike?

An instant-melee button: forcing players to keep their distance and be able to strike an unsuspecting enemy with a single click... instead of memorizing hotkeys.

You mean like Duke Nukem 3D? That had a melee button without dropping your current weapon. Or hey, both Quake 3 and especially UT had lethal melee damage options, though not as a quick button to hit. So you could argue this was a subtle refinement of what had come before it.

An instant-grenade button: allowing players to utilise grenades more naturally and giving more options for any given situation... instead of memorizing hotkeys.

You mean like Shadow Warrior, Team Fortress Classic, and Soldier of Fortune? How is this not memorizing hotkeys if you have to hit an additional button to do it, just like previous games that had this?

A recharging shield system, essentially meaning that if you don't kill the enemy in one fight, you still have a formidable foe if you let your guard down.

This one is a little more nebulous as I think some multiplayer mods for HL had this and Max Payne had sort of a low-level health regen, but this wasn't seen in a major FPS prior to Halo that I can think of. You can make an argument for that, at least in FPSs.

Not all of these are inherently good. But Halo did them well and was the first time any game had all these features and more, and it worked.

And Half-Life had in-game cutscenes, advanced AI, headshots, NPCs that would assist you. SiN had a couple branching paths, interactivity with the world, area-based damage, salvageable armor, minor vehicle sections, etc. Deus Ex had a fleshed out world with massive dialogue, choices, grid based inventory system, RPG skill system, all sorts of tool assists, etc. The point here is there were multiple landmark FPS prior to Halo that both added new elements and refined others that came before it into one giant package. Halo wasn't special in that way. What WAS special about it was that it broke new ground on playing a FPS with a gamepad and that it was a competent flagship game for a new console. If it had been released on PC first, or had been after another competent multiplayer FPS, it would have been another game to add to the pile. Except for the gamepad innovations (which there really was no previous precedent for), it was much more of a right place at the right time situation than anything.

What I'm seeing from people defending Halo up and down as being innovative is a lack of knowledge of games that came before it.

 

[Flogger23m]

And the alternative is what? CSGO? Overwatch (talk about bunny hops). I'm sorry you can't handle movement in more than two dimensions. Maybe stick with doom on DOS?

Agreed. I played Halo a bit on Xbox, only fully played it one PC along with Halo 2. Back when it was new, it seemed fairly impressive and the co-op campaign was certainly nice. But once I played through it, the campaign did not seem all that great. Repetitive, repeating areas and the like. Not a great game, but not horrible. MP seemed like a weaker UT 2004.

But consider what some of the most popular PC shooters in recent years have been:
Team Fortress 2
Overwatch

Can we really sit here insulting Halo when that trash has taken the industry by storm?

 

[Vader1975]

That was my thought, I did play it when it first came out on PC though. It was pretty flat and forgettable though. I never finished the Xbox version which I had first and for the time, it did look great for console standards. By PC standards, graphics were pretty bad, performance was terrible, single player okay, MP was a joke comparing to other MP games such as CS, UT, Quake 3 and various mods, etc. IMHO the game is pretty average at best, I really don't understand what all the rage and excitement is/was about it.

Maybe it was the magnetic auto aim system for people who couldn't actually compete in a real FPS.

 

[MavericK]

Can we really sit here insulting Halo when that trash has taken the industry by storm?

Yeah...because as a poster above said, Halo popularized (did not invent, but did popularize) things like the 2-weapon system, health regen, and melee bullshit. Which are mechanics that many of the "popular" shooters nowadays employ and IMO we are not better for it. We have to wait for a gem like Doom (2016) to come out to bring us back to greatness.

(I realize that Overwatch and TF2 are not like the above, but they have their own problems...)