Format Xbox
Developer Bungie
Publisher Microsoft Game Studios
Origin US
Release 2001
Steve Jobs is on stage, promising “one of the coolest [games] I’ve ever seen”. He introduces Bungie co-founder Jason Jones, and his new game. “We’re gonna see, for the first time, Halo.” Perhaps you’ve seen this 1999 Macworld demo. If so, you know that it looks (and sounds) an awful lot like the Halo that would launch nearly two and a half years later. There’s a soldier in green armour, and a jeep ride with a marine on the turret, all accompanied by the monkish chants of Martin O’Donnell’s score.
OK, the character designs aren’t quite there yet, the planet they’re on is a little too bare – but there are two rather more important distinctions to note. One: the demo, as Jones announces before showing it off, “is being rendered in realtime, on a Macintosh”. Two: the whole thing plays out in thirdperson.
By the time of its launch in November 2001, would undergo a serious transformation. But even before it reached this San Francisco stage, the game had changed an awful lot from where it began, with Jones and art director tinkering while the rest of Bungie worked on the sequel to the studio’s fantasy RTS. “We knew we wanted to create some sort of sci-fi, military adventure,” Lehto tells us. “It was based on – it used the same engine. It was going to be open world. It was going to be more of a realtime strategy game where you were giving orders to your ground units, as well as vehicles, tanks and
