How Halo: Combat Evolved Shaped First-Person Shooter Games For Years To Come

THE FIRST TIME I PLAYED HALO: COMBAT EVOLVED was off a pirated DVD on a modded Xbox console. So popular was the game from then Chicago-based developer Bungie that you couldn’t find a genuine copy even if you tried.

This was 2001; five years before Microsoft deemed it fit to launch the Xbox brand in India. I didn’t realise it then, but a lot of what we take for granted in gaming now, started with Halo.

Take the controls, for instance. Refined relentlessly in the run up to the release, they have been the de facto ever since. From Battlefield to Doom and everything in between, many popular titles have used the same two-stick layout, to the point where it’s instinctive to know which stick aims and which one moves. A single game pioneered that muscle memory for gamers everywhere and modernised the first-person shooter genre.

Then there were the environments. Despite it running on what was seen as a gimped PC, Halo’s vistas sprawled, giving its campaign a sense of scale never seen before. Be it levels like ‘The Silent Cartographer’ with its beach assault, ‘Assault on the Control Room’ with its snowy peaks and indoor chambers, or ‘Two Betrayals’, which has you piloting the Banshee—an alien aerial vehicle, it was more than just linear corridors that most shooters were.

Combined with the design mantra of “30 seconds of fun” and looping it—combat, movement, cover, repeat—it influenced a generation of games that followed such as Microsoft’s own Gears of War, Just Cause, and Far Cry, to name a few.

You cannot forget the iconic Warthog. Essentially a jeep with a gunner seat, it wasn’t new to games even in 2001. Combined with physics that let you flip it across the battlefield, you seamlessly transitioned from onfoot skirmishes to vehicular combat.

However, the one aspect of Halo that’s criminally undersold is the social layer. Be it via split screen co-op or running ethernet cables between multiple TVs and Xboxes for multiplayer, it predates Counter-Strike at cyber cafes for some gamers.

More so when Reliance and Microsoft partnered for a Halo championship in 2003 for the PC version. Such was the appeal of Halo that the game was available in India officially on PC while the console that popular - ised it still wasn’t.

That’s a piece of Halo legacy that Call of Duty, Fortnite, and even mobile giants like Free Fire and BGMI have inherited: the idea that a first-person shooter game is a place to hang out and not just a game.

Though Halo: Combat Evolved wasn’t perfect, its impact can’t be understated. 

It’s the reason the Xbox brand endures to this day (despite missteps and lay-offs aplenty). It set the control template for every shooter to follow and made multiplayer gaming more accessible and convenient.

By the time you read this, Halo: Campaign Evolved, the imaginatively-titled remake would be out for the Xbox Series X|S, PC, and for the first time ever: PS5. As the name suggests, it’s just the campaign (albeit with online and couch co-op), which is a bit of a letdown.

There’s a sense of absurdity to it all.

Because let’s be honest. What was Halo: Combat Evolved when it came out in November 2001? A launch title for a console nobody was sure they needed, made by a studio nobody heard of, running on hardware that was a knee-capped PC in a black box. It shouldn’t have worked. It worked anyway and defined gaming for generations to come.

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