The History of Halo
- Scribbled on September 22nd, 2007 by Jonah Falcon
- Filed in Features, Microsoft Xbox, Microsoft Xbox 360, Retro, Shooter
IGN has a comprehensive history of Halo, chock full of interesting factoids.
An excerpt:
The Master Chief set foot on Halo for the first time in 1998, and he was armed to the teeth.
Machetes, flamethrowers, mini-guns, a gravity weapon, SMGs, bazookas, pistols, rifles, and harpoon guns to deal with the odd sea monster (never built), plus a host of alien ordinance, all found its way to the ring, itself featuring a missing segment connected by scaffolding. Helicopters hovered overhead. Zodiac boats were on the beach. Local dinosaurs and rubber chicken-looking “blind wolves” could be subdued and used for cheap transport like a less-than-epic World of Warcraft mount.
Many became preludes. Most were simply cut by the time Jones shared the stage with Apple CEO Steve Jobs at MacWorld ‘99 for Halo’s public debut. The crowd went crazy for it. Jobs announced Halo would release for Mac and PC same-day.
Reps from Microsoft saw the presentation as well. Microsoft was secretly developing its first gaming system since collaborating on the Dreamcast and headhunting top-notch content to launch it. Midway surfaced as a likely acquisition, but in June of 2000, less than three months after confirming “the Xbox project” to the press, Microsoft cut a check for $50 million and Bungie cashed it. Take-Two disengaged, taking the rights to Myth and Oni with them. MacAddicts everywhere howled in betrayal. Bungie was now a wholly-owned subsidiary of Microsoft.
(Thanks, IGN.)
September 22nd, 2007 at 9:30 am
Excellent article.
The statement about the origins of the Halo structure, “Dyson Ring inspired by Iain M. Banks’ Culture novels.”, has raised my curiousity. I’ll have to poke around because my fist knowledge of a Dyson ring was Larry Niven’s “Ringworld”.
In Ringworld, the ring had it’s own gravitationally centric sun. The very definition of a Dyson ring. In Halo, the ring orbits a nearby sun. A slightly different beast.
September 22nd, 2007 at 11:29 am
Yes, Larry Niven first came up with the idea of the Ringworld. The whole point of the world being in a ring was to generate gravity by having the ring spin, much like in the space station in “2001: A Space Odyssey”. This was potentially more feasible than a Dyson sphere, which would require a lot more material to construct and would have to have gravity generated in some other fashion.
September 22nd, 2007 at 1:06 pm
However, Halo is not a true Ringworld, since it is a moon-sized satellite of a planet, not a ring encircling a sun.