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First Person Shooters (Games) PC Games (Games) XBox (Games) Entertainment Games

Evolution of Halo Video Finally Released Online 59

Posted by simoniker from the long-time-coming dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Halo.bungie.org has made available a video showing the evolution of Halo, from its initial conception as a PC-based RTS game to its final release on the Xbox. The video is 14 minutes long, and is a 'look at some very early builds of Halo, with voiceover and commentary by 4 Bungie employees'. The video was originally shown to a group of Bungie fans at E3 in 2002, and has never been available save 'a [rudimentary] shakycam version' until now - it's being distributed via BitTorrent."
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Evolution of Halo Video Finally Released Online More

Evolution of Halo Video Finally Released Online

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  • ahh... (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward

    The evolution of Halo... otherwise known as "How Microsoft managed to turn what could have been a fantastic PC game into crap, seriously delayed crap at that, so that they could bust into the console market." I don't think I have the stomach to watch this.

    • Re:ahh... (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Huxley_Dunsany ( 659554 )
      ...otherwise known as "How Microsoft managed to turn what could have been a fantastic PC game into crap..."

      Ummm, don't you mean "...otherwise known as "How Microsoft managed to turn what could have been a fantastic Mac game into crap..."?

      Just wondering.

      Huxley

      • Re:ahh... (Score:4, Insightful)

        by bigman2003 ( 671309 ) on Thursday March 11, 2004 @08:18AM (#8530811) Homepage
        Yes, it would have been a fantastic game on a Mac.

        Until Bungie realised that the number of people who would have purchased the game for a Mac (Number of interested Mac owners - number of interested Mac owners who can run the game = 17) would have been abyssmally small.

        So instead, they made themselves a ton of money for thier efforts, and sold millions of copies. If Halo had been a Mac game to begin with, I really don't think people would care enough to watch a video about its creation 3 years later.

        I don't see a problem with that. I think they are a commercial, for-profit company. Not some sort of social program.
        • Yeah, Marathon was really sweet too... does anyone outside of hardcore gamers even know about it? No. And those that do, know of it because they have researched Bungie's history because the love Halo on xbox so much.

          And my vote says that Halo on xbox kicks ass. It s my favorite game ever.

          Bungie selling out to MS was the best thing they ever did (IMO). Now I get to play a game that I never would have got to play. All the macs I have ever had suck at playing games. I leave that for my consoles.
          • Marathon was a very cool game. We used to play it in the Mac lab at school. Not many of us could afford Macs at the time and one of our CS major friends was the Mac lab admin for the Art department. He did not do much administration unless you count loading Marathon on all the networked Macs and setting up weekly overnight LAN parties.
            • I have a story just like that from my school (Drexel)... I was always in the computer lab downstairs doing work... every so often someone would say "I'm Gathering" and you would hear 6 people start up marathon...

              I used to play it soo much, I coild configure all of the keys in like 10 seconds (I had the order memorized)... those were the good ol days...
            • Pathways into Darkness owned Marathon. Best game EVER.
        • Except they'd already announced there'd be a Windows version released alongside the Mac version, and the original website also listed PlayStation 2.

    • Yup. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by MachDelta ( 704883 ) on Thursday March 11, 2004 @04:38AM (#8530201)
      Like the one guy in the video said while they were previewing their whole huge arsenal of PC weapons...

      "Halo used to be cool."
      • Like the comic book guy in the Simpsons says: "Worst Episode Ever!".

        The jokes on you dude. The guy in the Halo video was making fun of whiners like you who can't stand the fact that one of the best FPS games ever was released on the Xbox and went on to achieve huge success.

        The simple fact is that if they released the exact same game for the PC or the Mac or playstation or the Gamecube than you'd be singing its praises.

        Halo2 is out later this year? Maybe I'll see you online.
        • You assume *WAY* too much there dude.

          One, you've got no proof of what the person who said the quote ment. Personally, I don't think it was sarcasm because it was said very softly and without emphasis - but honestly it doesn't what his intention was, because I am agreeing with his literal statement.

          Two, I did not whine, and no where in the one line I wrote does it even hint that "I can't stand the fact that one of the best FPS games ever, blah blah blah...". You're just making that shit up to defend agai

    • Re:ahh... (Score:2, Interesting)

      by oni ( 41625 )
      is there a list somewhere of all the various changes that MS insisted on? I've heard people say that MS made bungie change the game to suit the typical console gamer (with a lower attention span) but I haven't ever seen any concrete evidence of that.
      • There is no list because that's BS.

        • Re:ahh... (Score:3, Insightful)

          by *weasel ( 174362 )
          ding ding ding! We have a winner!

          It's sour grapes from a community that wanted Halo to release for the PC, but didn't get it until it was 3 years past its freshness date.

          Sure for a late 2003 release it was roughly par for the course for PC play. But for a console FPS in 2001, it was a gold mine. Coop play has alot to do with that, and the PC port didn't have it.

          I do envy their banshees and fuel rod launchers and new maps in multiplay every now and again though. But my PC isn't about to run it at an ac
    • I saw this video 9 months ago.

  • Is something missing or are my eyes playin tricks? (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I watched the thing and the part where the Redmond dump truck (with the "$" sign on the side) pulls up to Bungie headquarters seems to be missing!

  • bah... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Danse ( 1026 ) on Thursday March 11, 2004 @04:12AM (#8530120)

    I used to really look forward to Bungie's games, but Halo on the PC did NOT impress, at all. All that time and they couldn't even get it to run even halfway decent?! Aside from a few interesting portions, the game was pretty boring too. What I wouldn't give for another game like Half-Life. Now there was a game that wowed me. With developers going the Bungie and Ion Storm route, the future of PC gaming looks bleak.

    • that'll be because gearbox handled the conversion.

      Still I don`t expect facts to get in the way of a good dig

      CJC
    • I do not have a PC/Mac good enought to run Halo, but I have played quite a bit on my brothers rig. I like the xbox version better. The did such a good job on the controls with xbox halo.

      • Sure, I played Halo on XBox (a friend of mine bought one), and the controls were as good as I can expect for a console. That still makes them clumsy at best compared to the PC though.

    • Yes, but Half-Life owes a *lot* to one of Bungie's early games called Marathon. If it weren't for Marathon, I highly doubt Half-Life would even exist. Other examples of innovation? Minotaur, a LAN-only maze game. Pathways Into Darkness, basically Wolfenstein with a PLOT. Myth, the first RTT game.

      So even if you think Bungie isn't doing a good job now, they were at least as innovative as Valve in the past... and they've certainly put out a hell of a lot more games. (Come on, Valve, 6 years and you've p

  • This is what BitTorrent was invented for! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Bob of Dole ( 453013 ) on Thursday March 11, 2004 @04:22AM (#8530147) Journal
    When's the last time you got a 92mb file at 150kbps off a slashdotted server?

  • Pre-commentary (Score:3, Informative)

    by Bega ( 684994 ) on Thursday March 11, 2004 @04:59AM (#8530263) Homepage Journal
    I've yet to see the video, since I'm still located at work, BUT -- A few 0.02 though. I for one thought the PC version was great - and kickass at LAN parties. The absence of coop is unfortunate, but I've played that enough on the Xbox (Yeah, didn't think of all you non-Xboxers there). I'm looking forwards watching this, since I've begun to really like the game.

    And no, I'm not an ubermicrosoft-Bungie-Halo -fan (not even when I'm not laughing over all the "where's the truck with $$'s from Microsoft at Bungie's HQ??"), but I can't see why people are whining so much over how it ended up -- it's a great game, it's got all the elements for an FPS that I like.
    • Also at work, so will have to wait to view it, but I'd just like to add that Halo is an excellent game. However patchy its history, and whatever regrets we may hold regarding what could have been (and whatever personal vendettas various microsoft-loathers hold), its eventual release as a console game resulted in an extrodinarily good, immersive, enjoyable fps with superb and fun multiplayer. Halo's many well-documented and lamented flaws (repetitive levels, checkpoint-of-death-with-no-ammo, etc) do not detr
    • Well, I don't think I whine about how Halo came out, but I must say I am disapointed with it. Mostly this comes from being a Bungie fan for quite a long while.

      I liked Halo, but it didn't blow me away the way Marathon did. Bungie was, at least at one point in time, capable of doing a lot better. I was expecting a lot more in terms of story, level design, story, length of single player campaign, and story(Yes, story really was that integral to Marathon...).
      • I have to say that I agree with you after seeing this clip. Of course, I like the final version's levels better than the ones they had proposed there (something getting used to), but what I found out from the video (correct if I misunderstood), that Microsoft would've been pressing them to finish the game (finish it or never release it), which made them drop craploads of stuff, weapons, etc. - from what I saw, there was ALOT of weapons not seen in the game.

  • On behalf of all dedicated Slashdotters... (Score:5, Funny)

    by SamSim ( 630795 ) on Thursday March 11, 2004 @05:39AM (#8530352) Homepage Journal

    ...I'd like to say: All right, Bungie's servers, you win this round, but we'll get you yet.

  • Stuff that was cut (Score:5, Informative)

    by Echo5ive ( 161910 ) <echo5ive@gmail.com> on Thursday March 11, 2004 @09:24AM (#8531180) Homepage

    This movie reminded me of all the stuff they were planning to have in the game, but had to cut for one reason or other. There was initially supposed to be a shitload of more weapons, like a sword for the Chief (you see them in the movie), as well as native wildlife on the Halo.

    Most of the stuff was extremely cool. Too bad they had to cut it. I remember seeing an old movie where the Warthog drove through a small flock of critters that scattered and fled.

    • Yeah, I'm pretty disappointed at some of the cuts like the sword and the wildlife on Halo. But when you really thought it about it, it just wouldn't have fit.

      Considering there are some players who can make it through the entire game using only one weapon, no grenades on Legendary, a close range one-hit kill weapon would seriously cause balance issues.

      As for the native wildlife, according to the Halo storyline the Flood spawn by mutating other lifeforms (hence why there are a million little spores and only

    • One oreason (or another) was no doubt this: Its a Console Game.

      Consoles are small, in terms of video resolution, ram and mass storage. They are big in terms of bit shifting bandwidth, which is what makes 100 consoles seem smoother than a 1000 PC playing the same game sometimes (that and the really low TV quality resolution). PCI archtecture is getting there recently though with 8x AGP and faster multiported DRAM.

      I only played the PC demo of Halo, and this was enough to convince me not to buy it. I did

  • Bored... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Rallion ( 711805 ) on Thursday March 11, 2004 @09:25AM (#8531183) Journal
    Give me a video on Timesplitters 2 or Goldeneye, or Perfect Dark for that matter. Games made by the masters, and IIRC all shared a sizable number of developers. Games that actually brought me something I'd never seen before. On consoles, Goldeneye was the first killer multiplayer FPS, Perfect Dark gave us the first decent bots, and TS2 took PD and added staggering amount of variety. Those games were the very definition of this "evolution" that Halo claims.

    Since Halo is always billed as one of the BEST GAMES EVAR, could somebody please tell me what is better in Halo (XBox version) than in these games?

    • Re:Bored... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 11, 2004 @10:14AM (#8531610)
      I'll have a go, why not? Halo brings a new level of emergent gameplay. What this means is that things will happen in Halo that the designers didn't plan - memorable things. Not just a funny incident with a chimp in TS2 or some wacky AI incident in GE, but events that in previous games would have been the result of a carefully scripted cutscene. It might be a chain of events set off by a panicking grunt. It could be the spectacular crashlanding of a downed Banshee, skidding to a halt as a flaming wreck three feet away from you. Maybe it's the time the Covenant tagged your Warthog with a plasma grenade, so you leapt out just before the explosion set the 'hog crashing into an Elite. Things that have only happened in YOUR game of Halo

      Simply put, you can play through Halo any number of times (admittedly some levels are better than others for this) and chances are you'll get an entirely new experience on each run.

      This makes it a great game for co-op; TS2 really let me down on co-op, because the enemies were in the same place every time ad you faced the same problems every time. It could be difficult, it could be enjoyable in places, but it was never surprising, never novel. If you'd seen it once, you'd seen it. This isn't a rag on TS2 - the multiplayer, the bots, the challenges and the extras were marvellous.

      As I never get tired of insisting, Halo MUST be played on Legendary. At any other level, it can seem dull, but Legendary will always provide a genuine challenge, whatever your level of expertise. Whenever I get beamed up to the Truth and Reconciliation in the third level, I'm always grinning in anticipation of the firefights that are coming up. I'm never thinking "here's where I'll have to do X and Y", because the game doesn't play out like that. Again, on Legendary.

      The vehicles in Halo add a lot to the experience, too, in single and multiplayer. Try a mutliplayer rally game with Warthogs, five lives each and infinite grenades; great fun.

      TS2, GE and PD are all great games, no question about that. They all provide different experiences. So does Halo. We can enjoy them all, surely? You don't have to pick a side or worry about which is 'best'. Just enjoy them all, relax, and be thankful such great games exist.

      • Re:Bored... (Score:3, Interesting)

        by Rallion ( 711805 )
        As for the emergent gameplay, I am impressed with the technical expertise that must have gone into it. Still, I think the effort was largely wasted due to some other problems -- mainly, the much-lamented repetative nature of the game in general. It's nice to have something crazy happen, but I don't want to have to move through dozens of identical areas hoping something will. And that problem applies even more when it comes to questions of replayability. I know this is a console game, I've noticed console ga
    • Halo had LAN support, which allowed 16 people to play all at once. Before this, if you wanted to play an FPS with 16 people, you had to play on the computer. I personally felt that this feature of the multiplayer was the main selling point of the game, although it also had some pretty nice graphics. The single player, while not bad, was certainly repetative at points and I don't think it sold the game the same way the multiplayer did.

    • Re:Bored... (Score:2, Insightful)

      by CFTM ( 513264 )
      Was Halo revolutionary? Nah I don't think so but it was a whole lot of FUN. It reminded me of the first time I ever played Goldeneye (Which may have be revolutionary for the console, but in terms of FPS's it doesn't really do anything all that snazy). Halo was a blast to play, it is still a blast to play ... particularly multiplayer with friends. That's why I like Halo, pure and simple. A game doesn't have to be revolutionary to be FUN.
  • I never played Halo on the X-box, well I tried it at a store and thought it looked cool but hated the controls. I am not a console guy. I really enjoy Halo, both the SP and MP. One big reason for me is I love driving/flying the vehicles, it's just fun. And sadly it seemed I had forgotten that as much of my gaming had become so hyper competitive I was not having much 'fun'.

    No it's not perfect and yes I do understand many for being upset with Bungie for selling out to M$ but, I am also sure that 99% of t

    • Re:Great game, LOVE the Vehicles! (Score:1, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      HA HA!! You replaced the S in MS with a dollar sign! Because Microsoft likes money!! Ha Ha! What an evil company - trying to turn profit!! Imagine that??? Jesus, I'm glad Slashdot isn't a corporate entity. Oh wait...Rob Malda sold out. It's $lashdot now right? Oh, by the way, Sun won't open Java up so they're now $un!! HA HA! Man, BURN BURN BURN!!! That'll teach those bigwig CEOs - some guy with a chair that's about to collapse from his immense girth is substituting dollar signs for the S in their company n

  • Bungie Semantics (Score:5, Insightful)

    by superultra ( 670002 ) on Thursday March 11, 2004 @10:23AM (#8531714) Homepage
    I'm not sure who says it, but someone spouts out sarcastically (~12mins), "Come out to Microsoft, and by the way you only have 5 months to make your game." Someone else seriously responds, "Well, it was either that or never release it and look for other jobs." It's hard to really ever tell if this was merely covering somoene's ass, but the intonation suggests that he really meant to suggest that had they not signed with Microsoft, Halo would never have been released. On one hand, I find it hard to believe given the amount of work they'd put into it. On the other hand, the fact that it had been pushed back so many times, converted from Mac to PC, and that they had still not even implemented core features of the game (ie. AI) when bought by Microsoft after all that work suggests that Commentator #2 is right. I'm sure there's a feeling within Bungie that they regret being rushed by Microsoft, but I also think that they have achieved much more acclaim and reknown than they could have with the PC version.

    In other words, enough with the tearing of clothes and gnashing of teeth about how Microsoft robbed you of your precious PC treasure. The video would lead us to believe that if it wasn't for Microsoft, this may never have seen the light of day. If the mediocrity of Oni is any indication, Microsoft may (gasp) have had something to do with giving Bungie a quick kick in the rear. A nuanced listen of this video reveals that what was probably more responsible for Bungie "selling out" were the terrible PC market conditions and publishing arrangements within the PC industry. The console publishing market, while more draconian, is better organized and managed than the PC side. The notable exceptions to this in the PC market are the ones still standing (Valve, Blizzard) and that's only because they've evolved console-quality standards.

    So, yeah, I know this is slashdot, and many of you believe that there's a CmdrTaco script that automatically distributes karma to a post with "MICROSOFT SUX" in it, but enough. It just makes you sound like the creepy stalker girl who drives by her ex's apt 4 times a night.

    • Re:Bungie Semantics (Score:3, Informative)

      by Xzzy ( 111297 )
      Publishing was always one of Bungie's demons, one that went all the way back to the Marathon days. The deal they entered with Take2 just before the MS buyout was an effort to improve the situation.

      To say it was the sole motivation for the buyout is probably way off, but I'm sure it was at the front of everyone's mind.

      The other publicly stated reason, can't remember who said it (either Jones or Soell), was that Bungie just wanted to make great games and had never had any specific loyalty to any one platfor

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