Even Halo: Combat Evolved didn’t outwardly seem like a promising draft pick for Microsoft’s Xbox. It was an American software company with limited experience making things that were supposed to be fun, and it was entering a market dominated by entrenched Japanese companies like Nintendo and Sony that commanded an overwhelming share of people’s attention. Prior to the release of the original Halo in 2001, the video game industry was skeptical of Microsoft. Halo 2 was the birth of the video game as we know it today: a mass shared experience. From the moment Halo 2’s trailer hit movie theaters-the first theatrical trailer for a game ever released-the game became something people did together.
What made Halo 2 so powerful on release wasn’t just how it made spacemen blowing up toothy aliens delightful, but how it made every aspect of blowing them up a collaboration. Tom “Ogre2” Ryan, one of the very first American esports champions who made his first big money on the competitive scene that grew out of Halo 2, puts it more simply: “They created the prototype of how to do shit.” We can see the crater now when we look at everything from the way games control to the way YouTube stars build careers out of dicking around in Fortnite. Halo 2 was the video game equivalent of the Chicxulub asteroid that may have caused the K-T extinction, wiping out the ecosystem that preceded it and making way for what followed. That Bungie, the video game studio that created the Halo series, began its work with an interstellar force crashing into the planet is deeply fitting. This is the game that defined what mainstream video games are and how they play for the century to date. It became the best-selling entertainment release-not video game, but entertainment-of all time when it arrived on November 9, 2004. It is patently ridiculous, an absurd action-figure collision as conceived by an 8-year-old drunk on Capri Sun and James Cameron movies. With the help of artificial intelligence embodied by what appears to be a nude, prophetic American Apparel model named Cortana and a turncoat alien called the Arbiter, ol’ Chief keeps humanity alive. He’s gifted with a remarkable talent for blowing up whole squads of aliens. The space marine is a walking tank whose face is a single head-sized Oakley lens.
Thousands of alien lizard people, religious zealots with improbable jaws toting mean-looking laser swords inside their bulbous spaceships, crash into Earth to claim it as their own.
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