From this....

...to this...

(Halo: Reach, coming out September 14th, will be the last Bungie-made game for the franchise that sold a million-plus copies worldwide. To pay tribute, GameAxis is writing about Halo and Bungie; past, present, and possibly future)

It’s a rather strange turn of events that Bungie will make their last Halo game by starting at the very beginning of the series story-wise; just before the masked wonder Master Chief comes a-strutting to be the sole superhuman Spartan attempting to save the human race from the war-mongering Covenant.

It’s also perplexing that Bungie’s drive to create a meaningful shooter stemmed back in the days when they made games on the Mac. To further that anecdote’s direction, Halo: Combat Evolved didn’t even start out as an idea for a first-person shooter. For those not familiar with the game’s history, Halo was suppose to be a real-time strategy game tailored much like Bungie’s hit series Myth; you control a group of Spartans and click/APM your way to victory against the alien Covenant.

The game was all shown and presented on July 21st, 1999, at the Macworld Conference & Expo. A year later, journalists were shown a newer version of the game which eschews its RTS gameplay in favor of a third-person shooter. Halo: Combat Evolved came full circle as a first-person shooter in its final public debut at the original Xbox launch in October 2001.

The story and assets from 1999, however, still remains the same, from the excerpts of the Cortana Letters which addressed Halo-related themes like “a foe fueled by religious zeal” and “the unbroken circle”, right down to the Spartan army models and Covenant troops which were retouched to show the graphical capabilities of the Xbox. Still, it’s really easy to spot the remains of an RTS inside the finished product. The huge open spaces where huge battles would be fought on, the seamless transitions between land and vehicular combat, and missions involving rounding up survivors and lost comrades to launch a full-on assault at the Covenant aren’t accidental designs; rather, they’re former RTS-structured missions retooled into an FPS.

If you want to go further with the RTS comparison and trappings, just imagine the Spartans as Terrans (a mix between mid-level tech and bravado), the Covenant as the Protoss (tech-heavy alien race), and the Flood as the  Zergs (uses sheer numbers as an advantage). If you see the mission “343 Guilty Spark” where the Flood overwhelms the human resistance, you’re experiencing a Zerg rush in a first-person view. Who needs StarCraft: Ghost, eh?

Of course, the one big thing that still remained in the course of developing Halo to the shooter that it is now is its sense of scope. When it was showed at Macworld ‘99, it wowed people because the scale of the Spartans and Covenant fighting was handled very well on the large 3D spaces. This caught the eyes of Microsoft, and as of June 19, 2000, they announced their acquisition of Bungie Studios.

The head staff of Bungie mentioned that the deal between them and Microsoft were all just formulated from talk even before Marathon was published. Their main reason was because they were enticed with the prospects of working with new technology; the platform was stable for them to work and tinker with, and with a huge financial backing, Bungie was able to polish the game to a shiny finish. Basically, this was what Bungie’s last shooter Oni lacked; passion can only get you so far.

However, this came at the price at not seeing Bungie be experimental with the company’s past games like Pathway To Darkness and Minotaur: The Labyrinths of Crete. But hey, there’s still that one unannounced project that Bungie’s doing with Activision, so who knows? Maybe they WILL go back to that path. After all, they are entitled to the rights of the game’s IP.

After a copious amount of revisions and a platform migration, Halo: Combat Evolved was released and cemented itself in videogame history as one of the most recognizable games of the decade. Why, you may ask? That’s another story for another time.