The Xbox classic Halo: Combat Evolved is looked back on fondly by many, and the franchise still remains as one of the biggest heavy hitters for Microsoft’s console. But during the original game’s development, there were no guarantees that the game would be successful. In fact, the original Halo almost shipped without one of its most defining factors — multiplayer.

In a massive feature called “The Complete, Untold History of Halo,” one of the former developers at Bungie who worked on the game, Jaime Griesemer, says that multiplayer didn’t seem fun and was almost cut until the last minute before Halo was finished:

“Multiplayer was also kind of bad until very shortly before the game shipped. You would just shoot at a guy forever, and they wouldn’t die.”

According to another former Bungie developer, Max Hoberman (who would go on to continue working on the future of Halo‘s multiplayer maps with 343 Industries), says that the design of Halo‘s multiplayer and how fun it ended up being in the final game was a bit of a happy accident:

“The original plans for multiplayer, pre-Microsoft even, were always to do something less head-to-head and more arena-based. On Halo the team just ran out of time and ended up shoehorning it in. It was never really by design, the way it worked. It was just a scramble to get something done.”

It’s lucky that the chips fell where they did, as Halo became arguably the most popular game on the original Xbox and influenced console shooters for years to come. As another former dev, Paul Bertone puts it, had Halo never had multiplayer, that “would’ve been an obvious tragedy.”

Posted: May 31, 2017 1:07 pm
Related Forum: Xbox Forum

Source: https://gamerant.com/halo-multiplayer-almost-did-not-happen/