The Legacy of Halo

In the 2000s, Halo was a force of nature. The landscape of the market was dramatically different from how it is these days, raw sales numbers may look meager now, but if you lived through it, Halo was huge. Even the little video game shop I frequented in the 2000s had a huge statue of Master Chief; Halo was just everywhere. And for good reason: the release of Halo Combat Evolved basically invented the modern console FPS game. Advancements like the extremely powerful auto-aim made playing a 3D shooter game with a controller pleasant; this is something that hadn’t really been done effectively before Halo.

Halo Combat Evolved did a lot of things right. From the excellent world building and writing to the evocative landscapes the game takes place in, so much about this game was simply stellar. The most important thing out of all of them though, was that it launched Xbox into being a viable, competing platform in the industry. Without Halo, I’m doubtful Xbox would have ever been a success. Of course, Xbox had other first-party titles, but Halo was a different beast. Halo was the kind of series that was on par with Mario or Sonic in the 2000s. Xbox never really had another title that was at this level ever again. Combat Evolved really lived up to all this hype. It may be odd to think, but this game didn’t even support online multiplayer. As any 2000s kid would remember, we would play it with system-linked Xboxes, all local. I think Xbox knew that Halo would be the driving force for all the success with their console, and a few years later they called upon Halo again for the launch of a new product.

The Launch of Xbox Live

Halo 2 refined and improved all the strengths of Halo CE, and then built upon them. Of course, I’m going to open by talking about the multiplayer, but there’s a lot more here to discuss as well. Xbox knew they needed something that would get people hyped up for the new Xbox Live online service they were about to unveil, and Halo 2 was exactly that thing. Halo 2 launched to absolutely astronomical sales, and the online features were also insanely popular. I feel like Halo 2 was the first online console FPS game people actually cared about; it had a very dedicated community that played it right up until the bitter final day. Online FPS had been a thing on PC since the 90s, but Halo 2 refined it and put it in people’s living rooms with voice chat and the robust features of Xbox Live that laid the groundwork for online services these days. You could have fun in Halo 2 even if you didn’t play online though; lots of fans say it’s their favorite of all the campaigns. They expanded really heavily on the story from the first one, and the guns were greatly improved as well. Extremely important series staples like the energy sword, dual wielding, and playing as Elites were introduced in Halo 2.

In the 2000s, I was a PS2 kid. All my time playing these two Halo games was spent at friends’ houses. In the mid-2000s when the 360 came out, I just knew I had to get one. The PS2 had all sorts of fun games, but it didn’t have the one that actually mattered; I had to get my hands on Halo. It was a crisp Christmas morning long ago when I unwrapped my Xbox 360 Elite and Halo 3 (thank you, Mom!).

Halo 3

The lead-up into Halo 3 was insane. The marketing budget for this game would probably eclipse the GDP of a small nation. This game continued the trend of slowly becoming more robust feature-wise. Halo 3 had all sorts of interesting things in it, but chief among them was Forge and custom games. All of this is primitive compared to something like Fortnite’s tools today, but remember this was 2007. You could open up Halo 3 and make your own maps and game modes from within the game. Much to my delight, this feature was super popular among the player base at the time. One of the trends at this time was to queue up for big team battle games and invite all the players at the end of the round to play customs with you. Custom games and maps were varying degrees of wacky at the time, but always fun. This was a golden era for this kind of thing in the community. My favorite custom game was Trash Compactor, a game in which you stood at the bottom of a garbage chute and tried to dodge trash other players blasted down at you! This may sound rudimentary 15+ years later when we are in an era of Fortnite custom games that have all sorts of custom assets and scripting and all that, but this was on a console in the 2000s. It was really groundbreaking stuff at the time. I hold those memories of playing custom games with random people on Xbox Live in the 2000s very dear to me. The Xbox 360 came with a mic in the box, so voice chat was extremely common at this time, it was totally normal to play custom games with strangers and voice chat the night away with them. I miss this era of online gaming.

Of course, I didn’t even get around to how good the campaign was. Halo 3 is my favorite of all of the games. It’s a blast from front to back. All of the really fun weapons from Halo 2 return here, but more refined. The entire game is more or less the climax of all of Halo, ending the series in the absolutely insane level titled simply “Halo”. Fans may argue about this, but Halo 3 is really the end. There is a prequel game and another game that takes place during the events of Halo 2, but the real finale of Halo was right here in 2007. And what a way to end it. There are few gaming memories more magical than bringing my Xbox 360 over to my friend’s house in 2008 and playing Halo 3 with him all night.

An expansion...

Halo 3 ODST is a little weird. It was meant to be an expansion pack for Halo 3, but it ended up getting sold as a standalone game with a Halo 3 multiplayer disk included. Even considering this strange release, ODST was a banger. ODST has the best soundtrack in the entire series, and it’s dripping in this noir vibe that is super unique for games in general. In ODST, you no longer play as the ultimate badass Master Chief. You instead play as an ODST, who has thin armor and weak weapons. The game is more focused on picking your battles, and it has fewer big bombastic moments than the main series. It’s a lot more grounded as a result. This game is honestly extremely underrated, and I think it’s a real highlight of the series. ODST also was the introduction of Firefight, a game mode in which you fight increasingly difficult waves of enemies. More or less, a Halo version of Gears of War’s horde mode. While this too was extremely fun, I personally found the Firefight offering in Reach to be a lot more polished and fun to play. When ODST came out, I was in a little game design class and we'd play firefight on splitscreen there; it's hard to believe it's been 16 years since those days.

A prequel...

Yeah, Halo Reach also absolutely rocks. I preordered the limited edition of this one and everything, and it was absolutely worth it. I remember playing the closed beta of Reach with a single map (Powerhouse) and just being totally in love with the game, even that early. Reach was just lovely from front to back too, just like the games before it. This time, we got a much improved Firefight mode; this provided countless hours of mindless fun for me and my friends. Reach also expanded upon the Forge mode greatly. It seemed like custom games were a bit less popular with the community this go-around, and the focus was more on making maps, but it still ended up resulting in lots of time spent playing around with my friends and making good memories. The campaign of Reach also sees us playing as our own custom character, with a crew of previously unintroduced Spartans. This being the final game in the series and it being a prequel that is mostly unrelated to the main storyline was probably a wise decision. In doing this, they could make the tone a lot darker, and this paid off in spades. How Reach ends is probably the most iconic ending in the series, and no doubt you’ve long been spoiled on this, but I won’t spoil it here in the unlikely case that you haven’t. Me and my high school friends played the absolute hell out of this game on multiplayer, all the custom maps in the online rotation kept me coming back again and again. Halo Reach is probably my most played of them all? It just came out at the perfect time for me to be glued to my chair all day on Xbox Live.

“And that’s it. That’s all the Halo games. All of them.” I say with a pained smile and a long pause.

Goodbye to all of Halo...

Ok, so after Reach, they gave the series to a new studio called 343 to make more games even though the story was over. 343 ended up making a lot of very bad games, and unfortunately as a result of this, Halo has faded into memory. However, Halo lives on in other games. Halo is a big part of the primordial goop that makes up the modern shooter genre. It’s sad to see Halo and Xbox as a whole fade into the past, but I think both of these things left such a huge positive mark on people’s lives that we’ll be seeing the echoes they’ve made for years to come.

However, do not lament, for 343 did us one wonderful favor; these games from the glorious past are preserved for all time in Halo Master Chief Collection, and it’s fully playable on PC. So while the world moves on in Halo’s absence, there is nothing stopping you from going back and playing these old masterpieces from the 2000s. I recommend that you do, I hate the idea of these magical games being forgotten.