Halo: My History Part 1
“The healthy human mind doesn’t wake up in the morning thinking this is its last day on earth. But I think that’s a luxury, not a curse. To know you're close to the end is a kind of freedom. A good time to take inventory.” - John Price, Activision character.
Optimism has its limits. On September 22nd, 2026, it was announced that the FPS franchise Halo would be taken away from Halo Studios (Formerly known as 343 Industries), and shunted off to Activision, the developers of the Call of Duty franchise. Worse still, the rumor mill has suggested that the series is headed for a full on reboot. This sucks.
I have my own thoughts on canon and the existence of differing continuities, but when it happens like this, I can’t help but see it as a cynical move. I want to rant and rave, but since the announcement I’ve felt a sort of calm. I am angry, if not for my favorite franchise being turned into a husk of its former self, then because nearly 300 people were fired, a bulk of which were from Halo Studios, including the story group.
But the quote at the start is how I'm feeling right now. I don’t have to clench my hands anymore, I don’t have to wait for the next installment, I don’t have to have anymore pointless arguments with the densest fandom on the planet. It’s a relief if anything, to not have to care about it anymore.
Instead, I’m going to be holding on to something that does matter: my love of what I have. I’m 27 going on 28 in December, and Halo released in 2001. The games series has existed for 98% of my life, and unlike some jackoffs, my memories aren’t limited to pining for the good olds days.
So with the future bleaker than ever, I want to stroll down memory lane with my experience with the series. I’m not going to get into the behind the scene crap or guess what happens next or even give these games proper analysis. No, this is just my origins with the series purely from memory.
I’m going to try and speak to my original thoughts on these games, and how those thoughts changed over time, but some of this was well over 20 years ago, so it’s impossible to be entirely objective about my then feelings. It’s going to be all over the place, but I like to think that I'm speaking truth. But without further ado, my origin point with Halo.
From 2002-2005 I lived in Germany and was in the Boyscouts. Boring as all hell, but I did make some friends who told me about this cool new shooter called Halo. I had been gaming for a while, but I didn’t own an Xbox, so I played it at a friend's house first. It was Halo 2, the latest game at the time, and I remember that we started on Delta Halo. The colors still pop when I think about it, the way it rode the fine line between colorful without feeling like kiddie stuff. I sucked at playing it, but my friend was nice about it.
Pre-Ownig Halo was a mythical time for me. I had all these ideas about what it was, and some of it was real, and some was bullshit. For instance, one of my friends told me that The Covenant called Master Chief “The Demon” because he was raised by actual demons from the bible. People just said whatever back then, like how one kid owned this Football game where you could pull out guns and kill people, then I played it and it was just a regular football game with a grunge aesthetic.
Another memory from this era was my sister freaking me out over my fear of moths, and I got a call from my friend about hanging out, and through tears I asked if we could play Halo, and so we did. It was a comfort to play this elusive game, to just get a taste of it, and was a rare time in my youth where I had solid friends to play Co-op with.
It should be noted that my gaming diet before Halo was rather eclectic. We were a Playstation family, though I was the one mostly using it. It was a lot of platformers, like Ty the Tasmanian Tiger 2, Kao the Kangaroo Round 2, Spyro: A Hero’s Tale, stuff like that. I enjoyed them, but I never really felt connected to them either, and the only game I beat of that bunch was Ty and this Open Season game.
Sidenote, but I was born in a weird period to be watching and playing franchises. Those are all sequels I played, and while we did have a PS1 at some point, we stopped buying old games after a while, so I was stuck with whatever was on PS2. Same with movies. DVDs were becoming common, but before that we had a ton of VHS, and we only seemed to buy whatever was out. So I’d have shit like Spider-Man 2, Attack of the Clones, X-Men 2, and of course a ton of Disney Sequels, all without the original films (I did have the original trilogy of Star Wars, I just didn’t have Phantom Menace for some reason.)
Getting back on topic, I wasn’t much of a military shooter kid. I remember getting a SOCOM game alongside Metal Gear Solid 3, and I played the former for maybe 1 minute before turning it off, and the latter is one of the greatest games ever made and I have played many times. I did play “Medal of Honor: Rising Sun” to completion, and this cheap WW2 game literally called “WW2 Sniper: Call of Victory.” But I wouldn’t be a CoD kid until the 360.
Doom, Wolfenstein, Duke Nukem, and whatever shooter games came out in the 90s were unknown to me. It wouldn’t be until the 7th gen when the reboot cycle hit and we got new releases of those titles (my dad was often the one buying them). So Halo was the first serious game title I ever latched onto, and would in turn influence my gaming habits going forward.
It would be some time before I actually owned them, and it wasn’t planned out or anything. One day, after getting out of another boring Boyscout meeting, my dad picked me up and told me his friend gave him his Xbox with both Halo: Combat Evolved and Halo 2 alongside an assortment of other games.
Looking back, I think the thing that kept me going with Halo for so long was that my parents were pretty supportive of my enjoyment of the series. The Playstation was the living room console, so I had the Xbox all to myself, but they knew I cared about the series and was one of my interests. Hell, Master Chief was one of 4 video game characters my Mom can recognize (Sonic, Mario, Master Chief, and both Solid Snake and Big Boss, both of whom are just Snake to her.)
While I was hyped for Halo, it was in that schoolyard sort of way, not the “saw a cool trailer and counting the days down to release” sort of hype. Halo was like Star Wars to me, as a thing that always existed. I can’t remember which game I beat first, so let's go chronologically.
Halo: Combat Evolved is one of the strongest first entries in a video game series ever. It’s still fresh all these years later, where other series were trounced by later entries, the formula feels solved already. The roar of the Assault Rifle, the rumble of the warthogs engine, the charge of a plasma pistol, the slapping of blood as I pounded an enemies corpse, the eerie quiet and welling soundtrack, the soundscape is etched into my mind. The sharp angles on everything, the painted on look of textures, its visuals were just as distinct.
Movement was smooth, not too heavy and not too light, so even just running and jumping felt good. Even dying was fun. Seeing Chief fall into an abyss, or get killed in co-op, seeing it in the heat of the moment was just something to laugh over, when now I would be white knuckling the mouse and thinking about where my last checkpoint was.
Little things, like the universal flailing animation when characters were blown up, the way guns just shot out and slid across the floor when you traded them in, the way glass breaking sounded, the random barks of enemies and allies, it’s all the small touches that give the game its personality.
I remember me and my friend Jackson used to laugh our asses off about killing the Red Elite in the First Level, talking about giving him and his friends “deady bags”, like a deadly version of a goody bag. I almost never beat the game co-op, but it didn’t matter, the sandbox was good enough that just screwing around and dying over and over was fun enough.
Halo: Combat Evolved, more than any of its sequels, is a game that coasts off its presentation. The Script is sharp, the characters are good, but besides the two twists halfway through, the story is gallingly simple, which is to its benefit. So many games that tried to usurp Halo failed to realize that you had to make something interesting before you could even think about making a series out of it. Give us likable characters, a good world, a good gameplay loop, then you can expand. But let's get into some specifics.
Master Chief was to me what Optimus Prime was for other kids, fulfilling that Peter Cullen idea of being strong enough to be gentle. My child brain contended that Chief, this metal giant, would be in-charge or something, but he showed deferment and care towards others. He was an equal amongst his peers, which looking back was a good thing to see in action. Combined with Steve Downes' calm and reserved performance, he was unlike a lot of characters I played. They were either completely silent or more complicated, but Chief was in many ways aspirational.
Cortana was also unique because she was a female character who defied a lot of gender norms I understood in games. I didn’t play JRPGs, no Metroid (though I often confused Samus with Chief), and the only Tomb Raider game I played was that piece of shit Angel of Darkness. So women were kinda alien to me in games. But Cortana was a well-rounded character, confident, intelligent, with a good sense of humor, and also innately sexual, but not in a way I fully comprehended. Yes she is naked, but was see-through, and weirdly colored, with weird eyes and strange markings on her. Combined with the lack of romance, I didn’t really bat an eye at her design, and I just accepted that this is what she looked like. “Nakedly” naked if you will. Jen Taylor threaded the needle between supernaturally aware and down to earth, being your guide to this alien world and your only friend after a while. More human then the main character even, which later games leaned into.
Captain Keyes was a good leader, fatherly and wise, but also left a large shadow for what little screentime he had. The thing I like about the military writing in these games is that, compared to its contemporaries, they were allowed to be people first. They weren’t drowned out in lingo or spoke in detached professionalism. I like Keyes, not because he’s my commanding officer telling me what to do, but because he and Chief genuinely like each other. Same with Johnson, who is just one of those named rando characters who gets promoted to Main Character in the next title.
I could go on, and one day I do want to take a crack at dissecting it all analytical like, but to me Combat Evolved is best understood as one of those cheap sci-fi movies you’d see from the 80s. It’s the atmosphere, the setting, the character actors, has a healthy amount of inspirations, and stands on its own. Easy to enter, easy to leave. This could have been the only Halo game ever made, and it would still be a stone cold 6th Gen classic, a nice counterpart to Cold Winter on the PS2. But I didn’t experience it on its own, but as a bundle with the sequel.
Halo 2 was the first time I saw a sequel as an upgrade. Graphics were more detailed, animations smoother, new different guns, vehicle hijacking, usable energy sword, duel wielding. To play this and CE back to back was eye opening, as often I’d play one entry that would be it, so I'd never have a chance to compare sequels. We went from flat textured planes and hallways to well detailed terrain with props and random material that gave a sense of place and history. Gregorian chanting mixed with electric guitars.
It all just felt more dynamic, with these proto-setpieces, like driving the tank on the highway or boarding the Scarab. That and the diversity of locations, as we not only visit another Halo, were defending Earth from invasion (in Africa no less), on a floating gas mine, the Covenant capital of High Charity, and even the levels on Halo all feel unique, almost Alien placed side by side with each other.
Of course, the highlight was the introduction of the second playable character: The Arbiter. Now, I had my own disappointments at the time. I didn’t like how all the levels were just fighting Flood and other Covenant, and the stealth was half-baked, and some of the Covenant guns seemed nerfed (For years I thought the Plasma rifle sucked, but it’s really good in the first game.) Narratively I liked what they were doing, as we got to see the Covenant characterized, and retroactively gave motivation in the first game.
But as for his character, what I appreciate about the Arbiter is, again, how dynamic it was. It’s a pretty brutal introduction to him, seeing him tortured and disgraced, and he has to work his way back into the good graces of others. If Master Chief was an equal to his peers, the Arbiter was a pariah. It makes his eventual friendship with the Half-Jaw feel real, the betrayal of the Prophets palpable, and his inevitable alliance with the Humans all the more satisfying.
I quite like the Arbiter. Even as a child I could recognize Keith David, as I had seen a good amount of Gargoyles, and he adds a lot of gravitas to the character. But for as much as I did enjoy his story, and I understood it well, the nuances were lost on me for quite some time. I didn’t have a religious upbringing like other players, so a character losing his religion didn’t quite hit as hard for me.
Of course, this leads to the infamous cliffhanger. The Prophet of Truth is still out there looking for something called the Ark, Cortana is stuck on High Charity under Flood occupation, Master Chief is following Truth, the Arbiter is with the humans, a lot is going on, and I was hyped. Maybe it’s because I played both games back to back, but I figured a third game had to be coming soon (I may have already heard the news of the third game.) That said, I can understand the frustration. Plenty of games back then promised trilogies and major story arcs that then ended on cliffhangers never to be resolved. Ironically, so many of them were so-called Halo Killers, such as the infamous Advent Rising and Haze, both dying on the vine. But I had hope for a sequel, you were allowed to have that for Halo back then.
The one thing that both games had that fed my imagination was the scale of everything. CE’s Silent Cartopragher is one of the best vertical slices in a game ever, and a lot of that comes down to the freeform feeling. While there is truly only one path, and barring sequences breaking, only one method of advancing, you felt truly free. You had an entire island to explore, and though there wasn’t shit to find, it felt like there was something. Same with 2, and this time it felt like you could be rewarded. I didn’t know about Skulls until later and they seem like a pain in the ass to get, but to this day I still remember my friend telling me about “Secret Sniper Rifles” and I still remember where they are on Outskirts. Overall, the game is more linear than the first, but the way the horizon would just seemingly go on forever left an impression that there was a world I wasn’t seeing.
But what this scale always informed was this sense of history and place. Whether it was on Halo, Earth, High Charity, wherever you went it felt like you were only seeing a small snapshot of a greater whole. Earth especially got my imagination going, wondering what the rest of the city was like, how people lived, and just hoping to explore it eventually. Every Halo Ring had these massive continents, and I wondered what could be on them. I wondered if I could explore it at some point, after the fighting was over that is. Ironically I never really wondered about the Forerunners, mostly because they were kept at arms length for most of the series history. But I did like the buildings we’d see in 2, the ancient bare stone amongst the foliage, and the underwater structures did leave me feeling wonder.
It was a universe that felt palpably lived in. I wanted to know about these species, these worlds, I wanted to know what my characters would do after the fighting. Maybe I didn’t feel that last part till 3, but everything was just so well laid out and characterized, I was genuinely curious to see it continue. I never understood the idea that Halo should have been a closed off series of five games, because playing those original titles felt like we were just dipping our toes in a larger world.
Getting out of universe, Halo was also a series where I started to notice inspirations from other series. Star Wars is the obvious comparison: Halos are like Death Stars, Energy Swords are Lightsabers, Cortana kinda resembled Princess Leia’s hologram, all very obvious comparisons to an adult, but as a child it was groundbreaking. Also despite being way too young to watch them, I had seen Predator and at least AVP at this point, so the Elites being inspired by the former and the Flood being the latter were nice connections to have. I understood that art could have similar motifs and designs, but this was the first time I understood it as inspiration. I could connect this distinct piece of art to another, and while I can’t really say it mattered, the act of connecting the dots gave the series a sense of personal history, like the artists were picking and choosing from the art they saw and using it here.
But Combat Evolved and 2 weren’t the only things I received with the Xbox. Amongst the games I was given was a copy of the Halo 2 Multiplayer Map Pack.
Again, I didn’t fuck with any mutiplayer till 3, but I did enjoy the bonus content it came with. “Another Day at the Beach” Cinematic, the 2004 E3 trailer for 2, and the 2000 trailer for Combat Evolved. Not only was it more Halo, but it was weird, like some uncanny version that had been hidden away. It was my first taste at games development, seeing how much could change before release. I was almost mad watching the CE demo because it had animals on the Halo Ring, you could use the Energy Sword, it felt like we got a worse version. Such are the thoughts of a child with no clue about game development.
To do this day I kick myself for not keeping the map pack, as it was just as informative to my journey as the games themselves. Looking up the content now, i’m surprised the E3 demo for 2 wasn’t on there, but that was also super eye opening. “You could keep your duel-wielding weapons when you switch?” and “I don’t remember the city looking like this.” It was the first time I ever encountered what would be called bullshot, made infamous by the Killzone 2 demo, but I was just so ravenous for any Halo content that I didn’t mind it.
Finally, for this era I had one more very important piece of media: The Graphic Novel. I loved the story and characters from the games, but I wanted more. So, I believe it was my dad again, saw this and gave it to me, and it did not disappoint. Four Stories, four different art styles, and all tonally different but giving snapshots of the Halo Universe, which were sparse as hell if you weren’t reading the books like me.
The Infinite Succor was my favorite, as it has to this day, some of the gnarliest Flood Art ever, just page after page of the wettest ghouls ever.
Armor Testing was and still is not my favorite. Nothing bad with it, but it’s just the backstory on Chiefs Armor, and it gave me the weird idea that Chief was a woman for a little while.
Second Sunrise over New Mombasa went right over my head. I wasn’t much of a reader for a lot of these, but this especially was a wordier story, so whatever it was saying wouldn’t be internalized for years. But the art by Moebius is the most inspiring shit to me. It is so different from what Halo usually looks like and yet it captures the world so well.
To this day I have my original hardcover copy as one of the few comics I had growing up. It along with playing the games were my only tether to this universe, and were the only things to hold me over until Halo 3.
Like I said, my thoughts are a little all over. Some of this is just the result of them being memories of a little kid, but I think it’s also just inheriting a series compared to anticipating one as a kid. To reiterate, these games always existed to me, it was just a matter of me getting my hands on them.
To finish this part of my story off, Halo felt special for me because it was mine. I mentioned playing it with some friends, but that never extended past some goofing off. Despite my parents' support, this was also a series they never really watched me play, and my dad never liked how the Xbox controller felt (not just the duke, but the 360 also) so he never played it. No multiplayer, no social media or forums, and it was long after the hype cycle for both games. In some ways it was lonely, but also personal to me. This was my thing, and while I wanted to share it, I also look back appreciating the solitude. I didn’t have to consider some dorks opinion on the graphics or the lore, I could just experience it on my own, and it would be my own. That’s what I miss about discovering art as a kid; that feeling of finding a book at a library no one told you about and getting enthralled. Like it was your little secret to the world. But time waits for no one and we have to grow up, and to give a hint for next time, sometimes it’s good for things to end.
Before I leave, I want to recommend Andrew Bluett’s retrospective on Halo, which coincides with my own coverage here. His own video on Halo 2 dropped just a few days ago as of this writing, and it is excellent.
The Halo Retrospective: https://youtu.be/XFvtvZICwNI
The Halo 2 Retrospective: https://youtu.be/OMxQDwwqPD8
Truth be told I didn’t want to start looking back on Halo. I have been slowly plucking away at a Judge Dredd retrospective, but that’s a serious analysis that requires research and reading and watching films etc. My own Halo retrospective was always in the cards, but down the line, but recent events have pushed me to make this. I have trouble getting motivated, so having a fire lit under me like this was good. I also just need to practice writing analytically. I’m sure my writing is full of mistakes, but the thing I really want to nail down is me. It’s been the attitude of online writing to be a little detached when reviewing art, but as Roger Ebert once said, “A group didn’t see the movie, a demographic didn’t see the movie, YOU did. What did you think?” and I want to abide by that. This is my uncut take on a series I care about, and I have to unlearn that cringe factor inside me. Andrew Bluett is really good at that, at just being himself when writing. I have at least three more parts planned. Part 2 will be the 360 era, Part 3 is my Wilderness era with the series and then returning to the fold, and Part 4 will be what seems to be the end of the series to me. Also yes I will get around to the Dredd-rospective eventually, I have all the material I need to start it, I just have undiagnosed ADHD and possibly Sleep Apnea. Regardless, I hope to keep this blog going. I want to share my love of art, and counteract headass takes I see thrown around. Until then, I’m Kraig Goss, and this is my corner of the web.