The sense of openness and freedom had been a core concept for the game from the beginning, and a top-down view was just not going to work. In time the Halo team grew and what became apparent was the connection between the player, the world and how it was meant to be explored. A very early piece of Halo trivia is that there was a build where one designer’s head was much larger, to make him easier to headshot.” I do recall playing a really early version of multiplayer which was just on rolling hills I am not sure if there was even a game mode back then. “I can’t remember ever seeing an internal build of the RTS or the third-person version of the game. “In those early days there was a ton of secrecy around Halo,” reveals Michael Evans, who would later become Halo’s lead multiplayer designer after shipping Oni. Yet in spite of this relative obscurity the project was kept completely under wraps, even internally. It was a top-down, Commando ‘lead your troops from the sky’ type of thing.” Though Bungie had already cut its teeth in both the RTS and FPS genres with Myth (1997) and Marathon (1993) respectively, it was still a fairly small-scale developer. Big, big, huge worlds a block of islands that you could travel to. “The initial beginnings of Halo started out using Myth: The Fallen Lord’s engine and it was a truly open-world exploration game. “We were in preproduction for over two years, starting back in 1999,” says Marcus Lehto, art director on Halo: Combat Evolved and the only developer to begin work on the game alongside Bungie co-founder Jason Jones. The irony, however, is that Halo wasn’t born out of an intent to innovate shooters in fact, it didn’t even begin life as an FPS. The enemies in Halo are brilliant, which each type reacting completely differently to each other. The original Halo debuted some 13 years ago, so we’re stepping back to remember just how it managed to revolutionise a genre. So when a game is notorious for being ‘modern’, for being ‘fresh’, it’s hardly a surprise that you forget quite how old it really is. Indeed, the franchise modernised the FPS genre, leading to radical changes in the approach of rival series.

When you think of Halo you think of multiplayer FPS and the importance of narrative in a game’s campaign – both very modern concepts. Here we go back to where the story first began. The end result was a groundbreaking first-person shooter that not only defined the single player campaign mode of many similar games going forward, but also turned hero Master Chief into one of gaming’s biggest icons. Originally designed as a completely different game when it was first shown on Macs, Microsoft stepped in an bought Bungie and Halo for its new Xbox console.

It’s easy to forget just how much of a deal Bungie’s first-person shooter was.

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