Halo: Combat Evolved | Code Like It's 198x

Halo was announced as a Mac game. In July 1999 Bungie, a studio best known for the Marathon shooters and the Myth strategy games on Apple’s computers, showed it during Steve Jobs’s keynote at Macworld Expo, as a game for Mac and PC with a third-person camera. Less than a year later Microsoft bought Bungie. The game that reached the shops in November 2001 was a first-person shooter, it ran only on Microsoft’s new Xbox console, and Edge called it “the most important launch game for any console, ever”.

Fast facts

Developer: Bungie.
Publisher: Microsoft.
Announced: Macworld Expo, July 1999, for Mac and PC.
Released: Xbox, North America, 15 November 2001; UK, 14 March 2002. PC (by Gearbox Software) and Mac followed in 2003.
Protagonist: the Master Chief, a super-soldier.
Multiplayer: four players split-screen on one Xbox, up to 16 on linked consoles.
Reception: ten out of ten from Edge, the fourth game the magazine had scored that high.
Sales: a million copies by the spring of 2002, and about five million by late 2004, as reported at the time.

From strategy game to shooter

Halo did not start as a shooter. Bungie’s team later recalled a strategy game built on the Myth engine. The composer Marty O’Donnell remembered a prototype with “that isometric camera, except it was sci-fi—there were all these little tanks that you moved around”. By the time it was shown in public it had become a game about one soldier, seen from behind, fighting across open country in vehicles and on foot.

The reveal came at Macworld Expo in July 1999. Computer Gaming World reported that the game had first been “shown to speechless editors behind closed doors at E3”, and that Bungie had developed it on the PC first, using OpenGL, before porting it to Apple’s new G3 Macs. PC Zone described “a complete world, over and under which a guerrilla war is fought against pursuing alien forces”, playable in the third person and “secretly in development for over two years”. The graphics card maker Nvidia used it to demonstrate its new GeForce chip.

Edge devoted a five-page feature to Bungie that December. The setting, it explained, was a ring-shaped world 100,000 miles in diameter: look towards the horizon and “you can see the curve of the world rising into the sky”. There were to be no conventional levels. “At Bungie we hate a lot of things but one thing we hate more than anything else is levels that are rollercoaster,” said Joseph Staten. “You get on at the beginning and you get off at the end.” The feature listed deformable meshes, real-time shadows, physics models for every character and vehicle, and a weather system that modelled wind speed. It also reported that Bungie had signed a letter of intent with Sony to publish games on the PlayStation 2, and that “the smart money” was on a PlayStation 2 version of Halo.

Microsoft buys Bungie

On 19 June 2000 Bungie agreed to be bought by Microsoft. Peter Tamte, Bungie’s executive vice-president, told Computer Gaming World that the studio was not in financial trouble and that other buyers had offered more money: “Why sell? For the opportunity to play a key role in the launch of the X-Box.” Take-Two Interactive, which had owned 19.9 per cent of Bungie, kept the Myth games, the rights to Bungie’s action game Oni and the right to make two games with the Halo engine. Microsoft took Halo and the rest of Bungie’s catalogue, including Marathon, and Bungie was to move to Redmond, Washington, the home of Microsoft.

Mac owners were alarmed. At the Macworld Expo in New York that summer, Bungie’s chief executive, Alex Seropian, promised that Halo would still appear on the Mac: “We still have a lot of love for the Mac platform.”

On the Xbox, Halo became a first-person game. “It needed to transform into first-person,” the designer Marcus Lehto later said, so that with a controller in your hand it would feel like firing a gun. He recalled that the team had about nine months to convert it and build the finished world. Some plans did not survive: the online play promised for the PC version was dropped from the Xbox release.

What it was like to play

The Xbox went on sale in North America on 15 November 2001, with Halo as Microsoft’s main launch game. Edge reviewed it in its Christmas issue and gave it ten out of ten, a score it had given only three times before, to Super Mario 64, Gran Turismo and The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. “Good is a seven, and Halo is not a seven,” the magazine wrote. “It is the most consuming, overwhelming, coherent videogame Edge has played for years.”

The player is the Master Chief, “a newly defrosted super-soldier on board a ship under attack from a warring alien race”. The game follows the Chief across the ring in ten chapters, each divided into several missions. Edge’s review picked out the rules that made it play differently from the shooters before it:

Two weapons at a time. “In a surprising concession to realism, Chief can only carry two at once,” so the player keeps swapping guns taken from dead enemies, and each has strengths and weaknesses.
A shield that recharges. The Chief’s status meter is “a shield bar which starts recharging moments after the player has stopped taking damage, and six units of health, which don’t”. Finding cover while the shield recovers is, Edge said, vital.
Automatic checkpoints. Instead of save points or a quick-save key, the game saves “before and after significant moments”, and because enemies behave differently on each reload, replaying a fight does not make it predictable.
Vehicles. The Chief can drive a jeep with computer-controlled marines on the gun and in the passenger seat, and can steal enemy vehicles once their drivers are shot out.

Edge praised the enemies’ intelligence (“outstanding on the normal setting, but on the hardest of the four difficulty levels, it is absolutely terrifying”) and the chatter of the marines who fight alongside the player. Multiplayer offered split-screen for four players on one console, 13 arenas and 26 game types, and linking several Xboxes raised the number of players to 16. “GoldenEye was the standard for multiplayer console combat,” Edge wrote, referring to Rare’s GoldenEye 007. “It has been surpassed.”

Sales and ports

Halo cost $50 in the US, and when it reached the UK on 14 March 2002 it sold for £40. In June 2002 Edge reported Microsoft’s announcement that it had sold a million copies since its US release. By the end of 2004 the Australian magazine Hyper put its worldwide sales at “around 5 million units”.

The promised computer versions came two years after the Xbox game. Gearbox Software’s port for Windows arrived in the autumn of 2003, with multiplayer for up to 16 players. It was demanding enough that Maximum PC used it as a benchmark, and Hyper’s reviewer felt that “Gearbox simply hasn’t done enough” to fit a console game to the PC. A Mac version followed at the end of 2003.

Later history

Halo 2 came out in November 2004, and players took it online through Xbox Live, Microsoft’s online service. By early 2005 the Australian Official Xbox Magazine reported that it had sold more than five million copies and that the series had passed 11 million. Halo 3 followed in September 2007. That October Bungie became independent of Microsoft again, and Microsoft kept Halo.

A new Microsoft studio, 343 Industries, took over the series. It released Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary, a remastered version of the first game, on the tenth anniversary in November 2011, and collected the main games in Halo: The Master Chief Collection for the Xbox One in 2014. New games continued to Halo Infinite in 2021, and a television series based on the games ran on Paramount+ from 2022. In October 2024 343 Industries was renamed Halo Studios and announced that it was moving the series to Unreal Engine 5.

Its first project was Halo: Campaign Evolved, a remake of the 2001 campaign with three added prequel missions, released on 28 July 2026 for Xbox Series X|S, Windows and the PlayStation 5. It was the first Halo game released on a Sony console.

Sources

PC Zone issue 81, October 1999, p. 19, “Shining Halo”: Bungie as the makers of Myth and Oni; the open world, the guerrilla war, third-person play, vehicles for multiplayer; “secretly in development for over two years”.
Computer Gaming World issue 183, October 1999, news: first shown behind closed doors at E3, unveiled during Steve Jobs’s Macworld keynote, developed on the PC with OpenGL and ported to the G3 Macs.
Edge issue 78, November 1999, news: Halo used by Nvidia to show off the GeForce.
Edge issue 79, December 1999, pp. 36–40, Prescreen Focus on Bungie: “First announced during Steve Jobs’ keynote address at MacWorld ’99”; the ring 100,000 miles across; Joseph Staten on levels; the technology list; the letter of intent with Sony and the expected PlayStation 2 version.
Computer Gaming World issue 194, September 2000, pp. 32–33, “Microsoft Bags Bungie”: the agreement of 19 June; Peter Tamte’s comments; Take-Two’s 19.9 per cent and what it kept; Microsoft’s rights to Halo and Marathon; the move to Redmond; Mac owners’ reaction.
Edge issue 88, September 2000, news: Alex Seropian at the New York Macworld Expo on a Mac version of Halo.
Edge issue 105, Christmas 2001: p. 65 (the fourth ten; “Good is a seven”); pp. 66–68, review (the dropped online play; the opening and ten chapters; two weapons; the shield and health; checkpoints; the AI; multiplayer figures; GoldenEye; “the most important launch game for any console, ever”; price and UK release date).
Edge issue 106, January 2002, p. 8: the Xbox’s US launch on 15 November 2001.
Edge issue 111, June 2002, p. 8: Halo passes a million copies since its US release.
Maximum PC, December 2003, benchmarks: Gearbox’s PC port as a test of hardware.
Hyper issue 122, December 2003, review of the PC version: 1–16 players; “Gearbox simply hasn’t done enough”.
Hyper issue 134, December 2004, news: “the original Halo sold around 5 million units worldwide”.
Official Xbox Magazine (Australia) issue 37, February 2005, p. 23: Halo 2 passes five million, and the series 11 million; hours logged on Xbox Live.
Steve Haske, “The Complete, Untold History of Halo”, Vice, 30 May 2017 (web, secondary): Marty O’Donnell on the strategy-game prototype; Marcus Lehto on the change to first person and the nine months. https://www.vice.com/en/article/the-complete-untold-history-of-halo-an-oral-history/
Wikipedia, “Halo: Combat Evolved” (accessed September 2026) (web, secondary): the Macworld reveal on 21 July 1999, citing IGN; the PC release on 30 September 2003 and the Mac release in December 2003; Anniversary in November 2011. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halo:_Combat_Evolved
Wikipedia, “Halo (franchise)” (accessed September 2026) (web, secondary): Halo 2 (November 2004) and Halo 3 (September 2007); Bungie’s independence in October 2007; The Master Chief Collection (2014); Halo Infinite (2021); the Paramount+ series from March 2022; 343 Industries renamed Halo Studios and the move to Unreal Engine 5, October 2024. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halo_(franchise)
Jessica Conditt, “Halo: Campaign Evolved hits PS5, Xbox and PC on July 28”, Engadget, 7 June 2026 (web, secondary): the release date, platforms, Halo Studios and the three prequel missions. https://www.engadget.com/2189052/halo-campaign-evolved-hits-ps5-xbox-and-pc-on-july-28/