Halo - Bungie; although Bungie has since moved on to other things, there was once a time when the name of the developer was synonymous with its franchise; Halo. Over the years the Halo franchise has grown from an FPS to a gaming culture icon and more. Going on to sell over 65 million copies across the franchise, it has come so far. In honor of how far the franchise has come, I'd like to look back to where it started: Spoiler • July, 1999 • Halo was announced for release on both Windows and Mac OS. At the time, Halo was being designed as a third person action/adventure game, though even earlier builds of the game had been as an RTS. • Jun, 2000 • Microsoft studios announces their acquisition of Bungie. At this point Bungie has now rebuilt the game engine and turned Halo into a FPS. • November, 2001 • Bungie studios releases Halo: Combat Evolved for the Xbox. The game is toted as one of the greatest and most influential FPS games of all time. Before the Halo franchise Bungie had primarily developed for Mac OS, porting games over to windows later. They also were notably the first studio to implement the idea of rocket jumping, back in the original Marathon game, though it was referred to as hopping back then. Fans of the Marathon games would notice some similarities between the lore of Halo and Marathon, along with some more obscure references like the marathon symbol showing up in forerunner architecture in later entries of the Halo franchise. Previously known for their Marathon games and Pathways into Darkness, the release of Halo marked a huge rise in recognition for the studio and pushed them to become one of the most recognized names in the gaming industry to this date. Halo CE became viewed in some communities as the pinnacle of the competitive arena shooter even now. Spoiler • September, 2002 • Halo 2 is announced with a cinematic trailer. • E3, 2003 • Gameplay footage is shown for the first time, displaying new features such as dual-wielding and improved graphics. The engine used in the trailer later had to be restructured and the entire environment shown had to be scrapped due to limitations on how large the environments could be with the updated engine. This restructuring of the build meant that there was no playable build for nearly a year. • November, 2004 • Halo 2 is released on the Xbox, featuring a new online multiplayer matchmaking system utilizing the new Xbox Live system to connect players via the internet instead of using system link. Forced to pull back on ambitions, both single player and multiplayer aspects were played back, forcing them to enter a crunch mode near release that prevented Bungie from polishing the game before release. This crunch to release on time is considered a contributing factor in the disappointments on release. Halo was not originally meant to be a series of games, though the success of Halo: CE pushed Bungie to develop a sequel soon after, in which they hoped to include features that never made it into the original game as a major focus, such as online play. The popularity of Halo 2 and its multiplayer pushed the games into a franchise that would be recognized for it for years to come. Spoiler • E3, 2006 • Halo 3 is officially announced, though early work and conception had begun even before the release of Halo 2 in 2004. • February, 2007 • The Halo 3 multiplayer beta was opened up to people that purchased specially marked boxes of the game Crackdown. This beta featured the maps Highground, Snowbound and Valhalla. • September, 2007 • Halo 3 is released across the globe. Its release marked the dawn of the new forge mode and an entire community based on building maps. •December, 2007 • The Heroic map pack is released as DLC, featuring three new maps. Foundry, one of these maps is comprised solely of forge pieces and marks a new point in the forge community and allows for players to truly build an entire map. • April, 2009 • The Mythic map pack is released as DLC, featuring three new maps. Sandbox, similar to Foundry, is built entirely out of new forge pieces. Unlike Foundry though, Sandbox features three separate spaces to build a map in; the Crypt, the base floor, and the skybox. At the point of Halo 3, the franchise popularity had almost reached a bursting point. Spoiler • March, 2008 • Development begins on Halo 3: ODST, a short side campaign built off the halo 3 engine. This would mark the first Halo game Bungie worked on and released in less than 3 years. • September, 2009 • Halo 3: ODST is released, featuring a new mode called Firefight and three new maps for its bundled Halo 3 multiplayer disk which included all DLC maps for Halo 3 up to that point. Marking both the first game that was released less than 3 years after the previous, and also the first game to not feature the Master Chief as the protagonist, ODST actually took place chronologically between the events of Halo 2 and Halo 3; and filled in the story of what happened in New Mombassa after the Chief left during Halo 2. Spoiler • June, 2009 • Halo Reach is announced at E3 along with an announcement of a public beta of its multiplayer to be available in 2010. This will be Bungie studios last entry into the Halo franchise. • March, 2010 • A trailer is released showcasing multiplayer components of the game. • E3, 2010 • Campaign and Firefight elements are showcased. • September, 2010 • Halo Reach is released. • November, 2010 • The Noble map pack is released as DLC featuring three new maps that are not pulled from locations in the campaign mode. • March, 2011 • Microsoft partners with Certain Affinity, responsible for some work on Halo 2 maps, and releases the Defiant map pack. Bungie now hands the reigns for halo over to Microsoft and its subsidiary 343 industries who will be responsible for future development of the Halo franchise. Reach marked the last Halo game developed by Bungie and also the second game to be release less than 3 years after its previous entry, though it was being developed in tandem with ODST by separate teams. Halo Reach saw a return of the firefight game mode introduced in ODST along with an improved forge mode with a multitude of new pieces specifically made for building maps. Many view Reach as the bursting point for the popularity for the franchise. A year after release Halo 3 had a daily peak population of 1.1M players, this went down to an unfortunate 20k players for Halo 4. (I was unable to find reliable numbers for Halo 5, though some things point to it being around 50k.) That said, the franchise and player base are not dead and gone. Our past is a measure of how far we have come, and we have come a long way. Thanks Bungie for giving us the start of this franchise that has grown and changed with us as we did. Afterward: Spoiler I decided to leave out the history and timelines of Halo 4 and 5 partly due to the lack of information on them in comparision to the older titles, but also because they are so much newer that many of us will still remember. As a result I focused on the Bungie Halo releases only, leaving out Halo wars and the mobile games as well.
Really informative article and it was enjoyable to read. Even though I only knew the latter of the Bungie days, I miss it.
Halo might not have the numbers anymore but what really kept it going was the hard core fan base that has stuck with it and helped make it into what it is. When it was in its golden years it succeeded in such popularity from the innovations it made to the genre but as other games started to adopt those and games like CoD or battlefield became the main generic shooter most people look for, the audience shifted to them. Every franchise goes through its low points but since trends usually come back, Halo will peak in popularity again, the time might be soon with the way that CoD is heading (almost to the point were their games seem like early halo universe games). Battlefield is going back to its roots and people are looking forward to that, if it does good then it will leave the game audience striving for more games to do the same, and if Halo 6 does just that (which with the talk of a Halo ring now in the mix it just might) then it has a real shot at shooting back to the top.
If Bungie still had Halo, this is what the in-game player models would look like. Yet we're graced with 343's majesty.