Waypoint has released a gigantic 35,000 word feature on “The Complete, Untold History of Halo.” The feature is absolutely huge, and packed full of content starting from the very beginning on Halo’s conception all the way up the Halo 5: Guardians.
The oral report includes a gigantic list of interesting details, including the fact that Microsoft were not fans of the name Halo at all. According to Jamie Griesemer (FPS control designer), “They hated the name. They said that it doesn’t mean anything, and to people it does mean something to, it’s not on-brand, because what we’re selling is the super soldier, not this weird space junk. In every foreign language it sounds stupid, it’s feminine—they had so many reasons why the name should be changed. They went for months and months, and they came back with a bunch of names. It was another border dispute.
At some point they said, “Okay, we’re going to do a subtitle.” And this was before subtitles were the thing every game had. We thought that was dumb, but whatever, we could ignore it. Eventually they came back with Combat Evolved, and we thought that was the stupidest thing ever. It doesn’t mean anything, it’s not really informational, and it’s not even good grammar.”
While the subtitle Combat Evolved might not have meant anything then, it definitely does now. When Halo came along, it changed the way that FPS games functioned on console substantially whether it was in the campaign or Halo’s fantastic multiplayer, a feature which was apparently going to get cut before the launch of the original game.
“Multiplayer was also kind of bad until very shortly before the game shipped.” Griesemer claimed. “You would just shoot a guy forever, and they wouldn’t die. Me and a couple of the other designers, including Max, said: “You know what? We’ve got to hit the reset button.” So we flattened it all out and rebuilt it from scratch. It’s amazing that it came out as well as it did, really.”
Designer Paul Bertone said, “Multiplayer is actually something that was on the chopping block until very close to the end of the project, which would have been an obvious tragedy.” Halo’s multiplayer was originally going to be more of an arena shooter, like Quake, but Bungie ran out of time and ended up shovelling in the head-to-head gameplay that the game had on launch.
Thankfully, Halo’s multiplayer didn’t get cut and Bungie managed to craft one of the finest classic FPS multiplayer games of that generation, even if it was completely by accident. If you want to read through The Complete, Untold History of Halo, click here.
Lewis is a games journalist, freelance gaming and consumer-tech journalist. They contributed 344 articles to ICXM between 2015–2017, focused on opinion pieces, game reviews, Windows and PC, and Xbox news: has since served as Editor-in-Chief at StealthOptional and Gaming Editor at MSPoweruser, with bylines at Gfinity Esports and FRVR.