BROKEN HALO MAC SERIES
BROKEN HALO MAC MAC

As its history has been told to me-a tangled knot of design, contracts, platforms, ideas, direction and incredible achievement-an ideal distillation is something that could realistically never be recreated. Xbox just wouldn’t exist without it.įor better or worse, Halo was a perfect storm.

BROKEN HALO MAC SERIES

Yet like Master Chief, Halo is defined by a devotion to fight: even when it stumbles, the series manages, valiantly, to up the ante. Bungie’s story rivals gaming’s most volatile, its marriage to Halo growing steadily uneasy under fatigue, hubris and the weight of blockbuster expectation when it wasn’t at risk of being outright consumed from within. That there’s an emotional core entombed somewhere under the stratum of dropped bullet casings and alien corpses is no secret among many the series’ many architects. Instead, as former Microsoft Games Studio head Ed Fries puts it, the games at their best are “vista moments”-evocative and hard to pin down, and maybe best encapsulated by the camera slowly tracking out above the bluffs in Halo 3’s debut trailer, Master Chief diminishing in the weight of the moment. Halo may have spawned a legion of fans on the back of its legendary shooting, but across a number of interviews I did with Bungie vets, I was told it isn’t how they see the series’ core. This was finally the back entrance I needed. As I went deeper, an entire universe started leaking out at the seams, referencing just enough for me to later get absorbed by the overtly cerebral vignettes in the 343 Industries-funded Animatrix-like Halo Legends, 343 having taken over the Halo series when Bungie spilt from Microsoft after 2010’s Halo: Reach. That precedent aside, though, the Bellevue-based studio set the standards for the modern shooter genre almost singlehandedly.įor me, any devotional attention paid to Halo Wars proved to be an accidental crash course in mythology. 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. 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. The original Halo: Combat Evolved may not have been the first home attempt at the genre, but it was arguably the most important. Not that I wasn’t envious of a capable console shooter, with or without four-player deathmatch.

By the time Master Chief had come to prominence as the hero, the star, of the multiplayer console FPS-and the term “ Halo-killer” was inadvertently coined-I was too busy sneaking through Metal Gear Solid 2’s Big Shell to pay that much attention.

BROKEN HALO MAC MAC

In my early teens, a friend once showed me a few screens of some rudimentary marines riding a now-iconic buggy over a sweeping plain, talking about how this, not yet outside of Mac exclusivity, was going to be the next big thing. Even as a primitive vehicular prototype, emphasizing the physicality of the terrain, there wasn’t really anything that looked quite like it. The project evolved spiritually as a kind of outcropping from the clotted battlefields of Bungie’s 1997 tactical game Myth, trading a Braveheart aesthetic for more of a Starship Troopers vibe, and then rendering everything in anthill 3D. Somewhat ironically, Halo began from a strategic position, rather than being mapped from the outset as a shooter.

Broken halo mac