What Halo means to the people who were there

Xbox announced this morning that Activision will take over the Halo franchise. An additional 268 roles are being eliminated across Halo Studios, and other first-party studios. A new team at Activision, separate from Call of Duty, will build the next Halo. Halo Studios continues as a small team supporting the community and the games in market.

I still have my original Halo shirt, the one with the letterform O from the logo. I wear it out and strangers stop me, mostly men around my age. They almost never want to talk about the game. They tell me whose basement they were in, who they met that year, which friendships came out of it. That has been happening for twenty-five years and it still catches me off guard.

None of it was predicted by research. Going into the Xbox launch, the studies said no console had ever succeeded without a mascot, and every proven mascot was cute and family-friendly. A silent green soldier who grunts one-word phrases did not fit the model, and we launched Halo and Munch’s Odessey with the same spend.

The moment I think about most came the summer before launch. Halo came out of E3 2001 with a low frame rate on the show floor, skeptical coverage, and real internal doubt about whether the game would make November. Alex Seropian, Joseph Staten and Pete Parsons and I discussed what cuts were to be made to the game to get it to quality, and vehicles were on the table.

I had spent enough evenings at Bungie playing split screen on Sidewinder and Blood Gulch to know what the Warthog was worth. Three friends in one vehicle, one driving, one on the chain gun, one riding with a shotgun, was ground breaking and crazy fun. We had no brand lift study and no data of any kind to defend it. The position we took was that the Warthog was untouchable. What we cut instead were story levels, most of them in the Flood section, and that was the right call.

What I keep returning to today is that the conviction to protect it came from a small number of people who were close enough to players to feel what mattered. That kind of knowledge lives in individuals. It is the thing being handed over this morning, and puts the IP’s future in jeopardy.

Halo: Campaign Evolved launched on July 28. Steam DB tracking put its concurrent peak near 25,000, and at writing 246 people are playing it. My read is that it re-presented the product without honoring what the product meant to the people who were there.

Halo has to honor that generation and move forward at the same time, and most attempts at this pick one. Activision has real capability operating shooters at scale. Where the IP goes from here is unclear to me.

So I'll ask the people who would stop me in the street. Where were you, and who were you with? And, do you still BELIEVE?