Halo: Combat Evolved

• 1. Introduction

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  Halo: Combat Evolved reached shops on the 15th of November 2001, the same day as Microsoft's first game console, the Xbox. Bungie built it, and Microsoft Game Studios published it. A reviewer at Edge magazine called it "the most important launch game for any console, ever." That verdict sounds inevitable today. It was far from inevitable when the project began. For years the game had no settled genre, no settled title, and no steady source of money. How does a studio in that position end up making the game that sells a console? What had to be cut, rebuilt, or rushed along the way? And what was the ring-shaped world of the title, and who was fighting over it?

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• 2. From Tanks to Halo

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  Marathon 2: Durandal reached players in 1995, and Bungie immediately went looking for something other than a direct sequel. One candidate was a first-person shooter that co-founder Jason Jones described as "the natural extension of Marathon, which would have turned out to be something along the lines of Quake". At the same time, the team toyed with a futuristic tank-battle game, nicknamed internally "The Giant Bloody War Game". Jones began building a 3D engine that drew elevated terrain from height maps. He suggested using it for the tank idea, and the team cancelled the shooter to follow him. Then Jones could not get a physics model for vehicles to work. Bungie turned instead to the real-time strategy game Myth: The Fallen Lords, released in 1997.

  Bungie at that point had around 15 people, all working in Chicago, Illinois. Once Myth was finished and a sequel, Myth II: Soulblighter, was chosen, Jones handed that project to the other designers. He returned to the technology that Myth had not used. Three staffers began a science fiction strategy game built on realistic physics and three-dimensional terrain. Early builds ran on the Myth engine with an isometric view. The first working title, Armor, was dropped as "boring" and because the project had changed so much. Next came Monkey Nuts, and then Blam!, because Jones could not bring himself to tell his mother the original name.

  To test ways of commanding units, the team added a mode that attached the camera to a single unit. The camera kept drifting closer, and the developers realized that driving the vehicles was more fun than ordering the computer to do it. Seropian remembered the appeal of loading a unit in, getting a unit out, and gripping the steering wheel. In his words, "this shouldn't be an RTS game." By mid-1998 the project had become a third-person shooter.

  Peter Tamte, then Bungie's executive vice president, had once worked at Apple. He used those contacts to put lead writer Joseph Staten and Jones in front of Steve Jobs. Jobs was impressed and agreed to unveil the game at the 1999 Macworld Conference & Expo. Anticipation grew after industry journalists, bound by non-disclosure agreements, gave favorable reviews at the 1999 Electronic Entertainment Expo.

  Days before Macworld, the game still lacked a permanent title. Candidates included The Santa Machine, Solipsis, The Crystal Palace, Hard Vacuum, Star Maker, and Star Shield. A branding firm proposed Covenant, while Bungie artist Paul Russell offered alternatives that included Halo. Some colleagues disliked it, comparing it to something religious or a women's shampoo. Designer Marcus Lehto defended it, saying it "described enough about what our intent was for this universe in a way that created this sense of mystery." On the 21st of July 1999, Jobs announced that Halo would arrive on MacOS and Windows at the same time.

  At that stage the premise was a human transport starship crash-landing on a mysterious ringworld. Early versions of the Covenant came to loot it, war broke out, and the outmatched humans fought as guerrillas. Bungie promised an open world, terrain that deformed under explosions, lasting details such as spent shell casings, and changing weather. None of that reached the final game. Creatures unique to the ring were also dropped, partly because they undercut the surprise arrival of the Flood. The Master Chief was simply called the cyborg. When Halo appeared at E3 in June 2000, it was still a third-person shooter. Behind the polished demos, the studio's money was running thin.

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• 3. Rescue and Rush

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  A single bug cost Bungie $800,000. Myth II: Soulblighter could wipe the contents of the folder it was installed into, and the glitch was found only after 200,000 copies had been made for a December 1998 launch. Bungie recalled them and shipped a fix. The studio then sold a share of itself, along with publishing rights, to Take-Two Interactive. Even so, Bungie had been living off Myth sales and had already missed release dates.

  Peter Tamte next contacted Ed Fries, the head of Microsoft Game Studios, about an acquisition. Fries was assembling the software lineup for the Xbox. He negotiated a deal in which Microsoft took Bungie and the rights to Halo, while Take-Two kept the Myth and Oni properties. Jones and Seropian sold the idea to their colleagues as a chance to shape the future of a brand-new console. Microsoft announced the purchase on the 19th of June 2000, and Halo became the main launch game for the Xbox.

  With roughly nine months left, Bungie had to turn loose gameplay and story ideas into a finished game for hardware that was still experimental. Jones pushed to switch from third-person to first-person so players would feel closer to the action. Shooters on consoles were rare then, so the gamepad was a major worry. Designer Jaime Griesemer wrote code that guessed what the player intended and quietly helped movement and aiming. The game also buffered inputs, so the result matched the movement the player wanted rather than the one actually made.

  The team moved to Microsoft's campus in Redmond, Washington. Griesemer said he was so busy that his belongings stayed unpacked for six months. Other Bungie projects were scrapped, and their teams were folded into Halo. Designers tested encounters and enemy behavior on a sandbox level called B30. It went so well that B30 became "The Silent Cartographer", the fourth mission.

  Then came the cuts. The open world was dropped. The lengthy campaign proved unworkable, so one level was removed and replaced with an expository cutscene. Staten described his job as putting "story duct tape" over the gaps. Lehto suggested reusing campaign levels, and glowing directional arrows were added after playtesters got lost while backtracking. Microsoft writers Eric Trautmann and Brannon Boren rewrote parts of the script at the last minute.

  Online play was dropped because Xbox Live would not be ready. Only four months before release, the team judged the multiplayer still not fun and rebuilt it from scratch. The rebuild used staff who arrived from the defunct Bungie West after finishing Oni. Some people took to sleeping at the office in the last months to hit the deadline. The new multiplayer had to work without Xbox Live, and that limit would shape how people eventually played it together.

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• 4. Look and Sound

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  For a while, artists Robert McLees and Lehto were the only artists working on what became Halo. Bungie later hired Shi Kai Wang to refine Lehto's designs. The studio's social culture and the pressure of the schedule meant people gave input across every discipline. Level design in particular demanded constant exchange between the designers who built the spaces and the artists who gave them their look. The Covenant aliens began as varied exploratory sketches that settled once each enemy's job in the gameplay was defined.

  Paul Russell led the visual design, which kept shifting as the gameplay and story changed. The artists worked to make each faction recognizable through its architecture, technology, and weapons. The human UNSC's original curved look was made blockier to separate it from the Covenant. Human weapons stayed projectile-based, in contrast to the Covenant's energy weapons. Human vehicles were modeled on animals, and the Warthog was inspired by Lehto's love of off-roading. The interiors of the ship Pillar of Autumn drew heavily on the production design of the film Aliens.

  The Covenant got organic, curving forms and a palette of greens and purples. The ancient Forerunner, by contrast, were defined by angular construction. Their interiors first drew on Aztec patterns and the work of architect Louis Sullivan. That look was refined only five months before the game was complete.

  The music began as a rush job. Composer Martin O'Donnell and his company TotalAudio were asked to score Halo's Macworld debut. Staten told him the music should suggest ancient mystery, and O'Donnell chose Gregorian chant. He sang the vocals himself, alongside composing partner Michael Salvatori and additional singers. Not knowing how long the presentation would run, he wrote "smushy" opening and closing sections that could be stretched or trimmed around a rhythmic middle. The piece was recorded in Chicago and sent to New York for the show the same night it was finished.

  Shortly before Microsoft bought Bungie, O'Donnell joined the studio as a staff member, while Salvatori stayed at TotalAudio. He designed the score so it could be taken apart and recombined into interchangeable loops of variable length. He also wrote alternative middle sections that could take over when the game became more or less intense. O'Donnell walked through the levels with the designers, who told him what players should feel at certain moments. He then built cues that the designer could script into the level, and the two played through to test them.

  O'Donnell used music sparingly. In his view, music works best to quicken a player's emotional state, and constant music becomes "sonic wallpaper". The cutscenes arrived so late that he had to score all of them in only three days.

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• 5. Playing the Game

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  A blue bar in the corner of the screen shows the charge of the player's energy shield. The shield absorbs weapons fire and heavy impacts, and it recharges on its own if no damage arrives for a short time. Once it is empty, the player is highly vulnerable, and further hits drain a separate health meter. When that meter reaches zero, the character dies and the game reloads from a checkpoint. Scattered health packs restore the meter.

  The game is a first-person shooter, but vehicles change the view. Pilots and mounted gunners see the action in third person, while passengers keep a first-person view. Vehicles range from armored tanks to alien hovercraft. A motion tracker on the heads-up display registers moving allies, moving or firing enemies, and vehicles within a certain radius.

  The main enemy is the Covenant, alien species united by a shared religion. Elites are fierce warriors with recharging shields much like the player's own. Grunts are short, cowardly creatures that may flee in terror if their leader is killed. Jackals carry a durable energy shield on one arm. Hunters are large, armored creatures with an explosive plasma cannon.

  A parasitic life form called the Flood appears in several variants later in the game. Aerial robots called Sentinels, built by an extinct race named the Forerunners, guard their structures and try to prevent Flood outbreaks. Sentinels can hover in tight spaces and raise a shield under attack. They lack durability but carry powerful lasers.

  UNSC Marines and ship crew often help the player by following, copying tactics, and manning gun turrets or riding along in vehicles. Marines fight aggressively, while crew members tend to cower or shoot while retreating. Kill too many of them, and they turn on the player.

  On foot, the player can carry only two weapons, which forces choices. The assault rifle holds a large magazine but does poorly against energy shields. Fragmentation grenades bounce and explode quickly, while plasma grenades stick to their targets first. Unlike many shooters, Halo lets players throw grenades or strike in melee without putting the gun away.

  Two players can play the campaign together on a split screen. Five customizable competitive modes support between two and 16 players. Up to four people can share one Xbox, and System Link can join up to four consoles into a local network. Reaching 16 players therefore meant hosting a LAN party, which was a first for a console game but often seemed impractical to critics. The game has no computer-controlled bots and came before Xbox Live. Even so, its multiplayer is widely considered one of the best of all time.

  Third-party software offered the Xbox version an unofficial way to play online. The Windows and Macintosh ports supported online matches of up to 16 players and added multiplayer maps. Cooperative play was removed from those ports because it would have needed heavy recoding. In April 2014, it was announced that GameSpy's servers, which the PC version relied on, would shut down on the 31st of May. Fans and Bungie employees promised a patch to keep the servers alive, and it was released on the 16th of May 2014.

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• 6. The Ring and the Chief

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  In 2552, Covenant forces attacked the colony of Reach and destroyed it. Reach had served as an interstellar hub of scientific and military activity in a 26th-century future where slip-space travel lets humans settle other planets. More than twenty years earlier, the Covenant, a collective of advanced alien races, had begun a religious war against humanity, declaring people an affront to their gods. Human forces suffered crushing defeats. The secret Spartan program produced augmented supersoldiers, who fought well but were too few to turn the tide. The starship Pillar of Autumn escaped Reach carrying the Spartan Master Chief Petty Officer John-117, and it jumped into slip-space to lead the enemy away from Earth.

  The game opens as the Pillar of Autumn drops out of slip-space beside a huge ringworld of unknown origin. The Covenant follow and attack. With the ship badly damaged, Captain Jacob Keyes hands the ship's artificial intelligence, Cortana, to the Master Chief so the Covenant cannot find Earth. Keyes orders the crew to abandon ship and crash-lands the Pillar of Autumn on the ring.

  On the surface, the Chief and Cortana rescue scattered survivors and help organize a counter-attack. When Keyes is captured, the Chief and a small group of soldiers free him from the Covenant cruiser Truth and Reconciliation. Keyes explains that the Covenant call the ring Halo and believe it to be a weapon. He searches for a possible weapons cache, while the Chief and Cortana attack the ring's control room. Cortana enters the ring's computer systems, discovers something horrifying, and sends the Chief to stop Keyes before he uncovers what lies inside.

  In his search, the Chief meets a new enemy, the Flood. Their release prompts the ring's caretaker, a robot called 343 Guilty Spark, to ask for the Chief's help in activating Halo's defenses. After the Chief retrieves the activation index, 343 Guilty Spark carries him back to the control room. There Cortana intervenes. She has learned that the ring exists to destroy all sentient life in the galaxy, starving the Flood of hosts. When she refuses to hand over the index, 343 Guilty Spark attacks.

  The Chief and Cortana decide to destroy the installation instead. They need Keyes' neural implants to blow up the Pillar of Autumn, and with it Halo, so the Chief returns to the Truth and Reconciliation. He finds that the Flood have assimilated Keyes and takes the implant from the captain's remains. When 343 Guilty Spark blocks the ship's self-destruct, the pair destabilize its reactors instead. They escape the explosion in a fighter, only just in time.

  Cortana argues that the destruction of the Covenant fleet and the Flood threat justifies what they did, and she believes the fight is over. The Chief says they are only getting started. In a post-credits scene, 343 Guilty Spark floats through space, still alive after the ring's destruction.

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• 7. Launch and Reception

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  Ed Fries described the weeks before the Xbox launch as chaotic. In his words, "You've got to imagine this environment of panic combined with adrenaline, but money's mostly no object at the same time." Several planned game tie-ins to Steven Spielberg's film A.I. Artificial Intelligence were scrapped. That left Halo as the main launch title, a role it had never been meant to fill.

  The game's move to the unproven Xbox cooled press attention that its earlier debut had warmed. A playable demonstration at Gamestock 2001 went over well. At E3 2001, however, the game was shown in a very broken state, with poor frame rates and technical problems, and critics reacted with mixed feelings.

  Halo divided opinion even inside Microsoft. Bungie refused to change the Halo name to please marketing research teams, so the subtitle "Combat Evolved" was added to make it more descriptive. Analysts also suggested the game had the wrong color palette compared with rival console games. Fries never showed those results to Bungie.

  A prequel novel, Halo: The Fall of Reach, appeared a few weeks before the game. Science fiction author Eric S. Nylund wrote it in seven weeks. The book was nearly killed halfway through, and Nylund credits Trautmann with saving it. It became a Publishers Weekly bestseller with almost two hundred thousand copies sold. A novelization of the game itself, Halo: The Flood by William C. Dietz, followed in 2003.

  The reviews were overwhelmingly positive. Halo earned 97 out of 100 on Metacritic, based on 68 professional critics. The Edge review added that "GoldenEye was the standard for multiplayer console combat. It has been surpassed." GameSpot said the single-player game alone was worth buying an Xbox for. IGN called it a "can't miss, no-brainer, sure thing, five star, triple A game". Gary Whitta of Official Xbox Magazine called it "a stunning achievement". Reviewers singled out weapon balance, drivable vehicles, and enemy artificial intelligence.

  The Xbox version collected more than forty awards. Among them were Game of the Year honors from the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences, Electronic Gaming Monthly, Edge, and IGN. The British Academy of Film and Television Arts named it "Best Console Game", and Rolling Stone gave it "Best Original Soundtrack". At the 5th Annual Interactive Achievement Awards, now known as the D.I.C.E. Awards, it won four prizes, including "Game of the Year".

  Criticism centered on level design. GameSpy complained of countless identical hallways and control rooms filled with identical-looking enemies. Eurogamer called Halo "very much a game of two halves", with a thrilling first half and a repetitive second. GameSpy also faulted the lack of online play and bots, and in 2003 listed Halo among its "Top 25 Most Overrated Games of All Time". The game's sales numbers would show how little that list mattered to players.

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• 8. Long Afterlife

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  In the two months after release, Halo sold alongside more than 50% of Xbox consoles. It was not an instant runaway hit, but it sold steadily. One million copies had sold about five months after launch, faster than any earlier sixth-generation console game. Sales reached three million worldwide by July 2003 and four million by January 2004. By November 2005 the total passed six million, making it the second best-selling Xbox game. By July 2006, the Xbox version had sold 4.2 million copies and earned $170 million in the United States alone. Next Generation ranked it the second highest-selling game on the PlayStation 2, Xbox, or GameCube in the United States between January 2000 and July 2006.

  The Windows version came from Gearbox Software, whose port was announced on the 12th of July 2002. It reached shops on the 30th of September 2003 with online multiplayer and sharper graphics, but suffered optimization problems. It scored 83% on Metacritic, and IGN told Xbox veterans there was not much new for them. The PC version sold 670,000 copies and earned $22.2 million. A Mac OS X release followed on the 11th of December 2003. On the 15th of March 2004, Gearbox released Halo: Custom Edition, which let Windows players load custom maps and modifications using Bungie's Halo Editing Kit. The game reached Xbox 360 as a download on the 4th of December 2007.

  The influence ran far beyond Bungie. GameSpot said Halo's subtle innovations were borrowed by countless later games, and the game is credited with modernizing the first-person shooter. It is often cited as the main reason for the Xbox's success. The terms "Halo clone" and "Halo killer" entered gaming talk for games that resembled it or were expected to beat it. The Halo engine powered Stubbs the Zombie in Rebel Without a Pulse. Halo also appeared at Major League Gaming and the World Cyber Games.

  Its sequel, Halo 2, took in US$125 million on its first day, with 2.38 million units sold. That made it the fastest-selling United States media product in history. Three years later, Halo 3 took in US$170 million in its first 24 hours. The fan-made Red vs. Blue video series used the game as its stage and is credited as the first big success of machinima, which means animated films made with real-time game engines. In 2010, Ed Fries made a freeware demake called Halo 2600 for the Atari 2600. In 2017, the Strong National Museum of Play inducted Halo into its World Video Game Hall of Fame.

  The 343 Industries remaster arrived on the 15th of November 2011, exactly ten years after the original. It was announced at the 2011 E3 Expo and mixed two engines. Bungie's original engine handled gameplay, while a new one built by 343 Industries and Saber handled graphics, and players could switch between modern and classic looks at any time. It added achievements, Terminals, Skulls, and the first Halo Kinect support. Its multiplayer used the Halo: Reach engine. In 2014 it joined Halo: The Master Chief Collection, which restored the original multiplayer engine and made it playable over Xbox Live.

  In October 2025, a further remake of the campaign was announced under the title Halo: Campaign Evolved. It is planned for 2026 on Windows, Xbox Series X/S, and PlayStation 5, the first Halo release on PlayStation. Built with Unreal Engine 5, it promises upgraded visuals and bonus story missions. The original multiplayer is not included, but up to four players can play the campaign cooperatively online. Xbox Game Studios president Matt Booty said the PlayStation decision was made to attract more customers to the Xbox ecosystem.

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