What's up with Halo?

Halo does it best to let you recreate the Elian Gonzalez photo.

It’s so weird to be seeing Halo in the news again after this long. The series was a cultural touchstone of the 2000s. Where is it now, though? Consider how Halo 2, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater and Half Life 2 released within a month of one another. Halo 2 was top tier among them. Now, I ask you: when was the last time you heard about Halo 2? The rest of those games live on in various huge ways. Half Life 2 is why Steam took off. San Andreas paved the way for GTA5 and is meme'd endlessly. MGS3 is universally loved despite efforts from Konami to erase it's legacy. Where is Halo 2? Arguably, it's influence is felt with stuff like Fortnite and Call of Duty. It popularized online multiplayer shooting. Does anyone mention that though? Do people go back to Halo 2? Of course not. Why would they? But if you look at it from that perspective, you render the game disposable. A stepping stone to something better. It's treated like scaffolding.

What legacy it does have leads many to say Halo belongs to a genre of First Person Shooter games that appeal to the lowest common denominator. Together with Call of Duty and Battlefield it forms a triumvirate of "garbage" so powerful it'll take decades to understand in full. That's obviously hyperbolic. Halo started as a creative venture. There was an attempt at an interesting, fleshed out world and I remember it well. It contrasts the fact that I can’t remember anything about Black Ops or Black Ops II aside from a foul mouthed man in a wheelchair. When your game exists solely to sell games, it's hard to argue for any attempts at world building You simply don't have time to bother as you're on a deadline. Halo had the luxury of starting as a passion project. It certainly didn't stay one, but that first game had heart.

I grew up playing First Person Shooters. Doom on my uncle's computer followed Perfect Dark, a pseudo sequel to 007: GoldenEye. Perfect Dark and Halo released within a year of one another and it’s a pretty good indicator of what can be done when hardware is well understood and when it isn’t. Perfect Dark's late release on the Nintendo 64 enabled it to exist as the ultimate culmination of everything it's developers knew about the hardware. Perfect Dark was packed with content and I spent hundreds of hours exploring every inch of it. Multiplayer with friends and bots was a staple of my middle and high school life. I could write an entire article on Perfect Dark's sheer scope. Never again have I seen a console FPS with more content.

Less than a year after Perfect Dark, the Microsoft Xbox would release with Halo as it's flagship title. Xbox blows the Nintendo 64 out of the water in every way. The controller had two analog sticks and it's power rivaled a console nobody would see for another five years. Despite this, Halo is a far less content rich game than Perfect Dark. There are fewer multiplayer modes, there are no bots, fewer guns (none of which are particularly creative), I could go on. What it had over Perfect Dark were better graphics and controls. That doesn't make Halo some kind of masterpiece though. I remember reading about how great it was in magazines growing up. Before Halo 2 was released, people talked about Halo the way we talk about Fortnite now. It was a huge deal for reasons I can't fully understand.

People don't talk about Halo anymore and when they do, it's all hyperbole. Either it's the shittiest game of all time or the greatest. It can't be both. Like everything else, it's somewhere in between. Why don't people talk about it in a more broad sense? How did it compare to its contemporaries? Is it actually good? For me, Halo is something that existed in my life until it didn't. My first impression with it disappointed me. I was expecting something incredible and walked away wondering why a Nintendo 64 game had more content. Since this is probably the only chance I’ll have to discuss the Xbox and its successor, I’ll discuss those a little bit too.