The Halo Series
I love Halo. It is one of my favorite game series of all time, it is broad, and deep in its lore, gameplay, and real world history. I think all of the halo games are incredible, and love each and every one of them. As a 343 era dweeb with a heart full of game design nonsense, delving into the older games of this strange legendary series with only a few elusive modern entries was one of my first real deep dives into learning about old games, and it always captivated me.
I don't think bungie were like, god upon the earth or something, but I do think that their games are part of an incredible and fascinating journey that video games were on from the nineties to the 2010s, and that the prominence of halo was... frankly a miracle. Bungie made games with a pretty weird tone back in the day, and Halo was definitely part of that. The combination of their own unusual extra-geeky brand of 90s doom sensibilities and the strange, somber, and introspective tone their games reached at times was very unique, and the success of halo is a standout oddity in that context.
Before Halo
for those who don't know, Bungie used to make Macintosh exclusive video games... it is astounding that a company could survive on making Mac games once upon a time, since Macs have always been very stuck up and weird, especially around video games. Frankly, the apple appstore having so many games at all is its own weird anomaly in the greater history its contained within.
During their years as the weirdo redheaded Mac game stepsister of studios like Id, Lucasarts, and Blizzard, Bungie made a lot of cool stuff, but the main thing anybody remembers them making nowadays is their first person shooter series, Marathon.
Marathon is like if doom was made by the fucking issac asimov fan club. Where doom luxuriates in the 80s-90s soup of "elevated B movie" sci fi like star wars, alien, terminator, metroid, and Akira, Marathon is wholly a child of batshit insane turbo-nerd far future sci-fi like Foundation, and The Culture. Because of this split, though marathon still has plenty of grinning space marines, easy to murder monsters, and slaughterhouse gameplay, its actual setting and plot stand out from all this by being... quiet.
Marathon is fundamentally a very strange and intense story. Its primary character (your player character does a lot of things, but isn't a particularly defined person) is a fucking door opening robot, for equal parts gameplay and story reasons. The main events of the game are about said door opening robot getting so smart it breaks the fucking universe, and the entire fucking game is set on a giant colony ship sent out by the failing martian government as a propoganda stunt.
Fun fact associated with that... Marathon literally happens in the same fucking place as doom, because the titular Marathon spaceship is actually one of the two Martian Moons hollowed out and stuffed full of spaceship guts.
But, aside from marathon's plot (which I am not sufficiently learned of to recount further here), its gameplay is actually pretty like... ahead of doom. Like way ahead of doom.
The first Marathon game uses Binary Space Partitioning (BSP) as its level construction method. If you've stumbled onto a site this obscure, you probably already know how it works, but in case you don't, I'll recap anyways.
BSP is about zones. with BSP you can lay out the shape and height of a zone, as well as if each of its edges is a wall, or a "portal", to another zone, which means it'll be walkable between those two zones. It is a common misconception that BSP levels are "not fully 3D" or even "not 3D at all". This is false, Binary space partitioning makes entirely three dimensional spaces, it just struggles to represent certain kinds of 3D spaces, particularly those where two rooms are directly above one another. A major part of this "Not really 3D" misconception is the fact that DOOM was pretty early, and pretty primitive. It used a rendering engine that didn't do very well with vertical look, had its projectile and hitscan systems ignore vertical height to account for it, and didn't allow the player to jump freely. Those limitations of DOOM's rendering and gameplay weren't in any way inherent to BSP, but for a lot of gamers they're associated pretty closely with each other.
Marathon loves to fuck with these expectations that DOOM sets. Both with its intricate physics system, and its actual level design. First off, the physics. Doom didn't really care much about physics things. Sometimes explosions would push you, and sometimes you had to run across gaps, or do some falling down platforming (because, again, no jump). But usually the physics of the game were not a concern in the front of the player's mind.
In Marathon, the player has access to clobbering the shit out of some fucking alien bastards, and this melle function is tied to the player's movement, with a player that has more momentum doing more melle damage. What this meant in practice was that a player could conserve a lot of ammo by focusing on hand to hand combat with enemies where possible. As well, Marathon let enemies running into each-other damage each other. So if your explosion threw one enemy into another, it was possible to kill both even though one of them wasn't even hit by the blast.
This complex physics made the combat a very puzzle-like and strenuous endeavor, about planning and problem solving as much as quick reaction time. This different combat style also paired nicely with Marathon's quieter tone, sparser combats, and more puzzle and exploration focused gameplay than its contemporaries. If you subscribe to the belief that Doom is an RPG then this difference doesn't seem as weird for an early FPS, since it was really just taking the RPG tropes of doom, and playing them with a bit less action than doom did. Similar things happened with like... Zelda 1 solidly defining the early adventure genre's action roots alongside early PC typing/point and click adventure games.
Earlier, I said that "Binary Space Partitioning struggles to repressent spaces where one room is directly above another". You probably found that wording too soft, especially since other sources of info on the topic talk about how Binary Space Partitioning can't represent such a space. This is because the authors of sources either have never played, or did not pay much attention to their playthough of Marathon. In Marathon, multiple levels contain one room directly above another. Because Bungie weren't just satisfied with "being doom but on a mac" they wanted to be better than doom, on a Mac.
In the case of the overlapping rooms of Marathon, I'm pretty sure this is actually a case of some loading trickery, since the level I have in mind features the player taking an elevator between two parts of a single level, and in that elevator ride, the game likely unloads the lower rooms, and switches out the map data to load with that of the higher rooms so that they can overlap.... or maybe it doesn't! especially since the game's live mapper confidently displays the rooms completely overlapping. Either way, it's awesome, and it broke my brain how good Marathon's level design is.
After the three Marathon games, bungie took a break from sci-fi shooters to go make other stuff for a while. Then after a long history of shenanigans. They started work on a new game.... a game that would eventually become Halo
The Genesis of Halo
I don't know if I'm a sufficiently skilled writer or researcher to put into words what I know about halo's pre-history with any real confidence, so this section is actually just two links to other people's stuff.
First, if you want to toy around with some early Halo stuff, and happen to own the halo games available on PC through the "Master Chief Collection" (it's always funny to me when a collection releases on steam as just a dozen different games that you can technically buy as a group), try out project digsite, which will actually let you play some of the early maps and gameplay used for Halo trailers. And look on youtube for dev history of the game aside from that.
If you want to learn about the fan community's reaction to halo before the game came out, I reccomend this fantastic video by one of my internet inspirations, Matt Colville, about the leadup to halo's launch. It also goes into some Marathon stuff I referenced here.
Halo: Combat Evolved
What even is there left to say about the first Halo game? there are so many great youtube videos about it that if you're reading some obscure neocities blog about the game, you probably already know everything I could say. Halo is a moody, atmospheric gem of shooter game design and early 00's gamer vibes. Its the reason anybody even knows what an "Xbox" is.
But, that all said. I'm still gonna try to say something about Halo CE.
First off, Halo CE was a big allure for me as a kid. I remember first playing it on my Uncle's original Xbox at my brother's bachelor party when I was 12... I still don't know why my brother invited a 12 year old to a bachelor party, especially since I spent the whole night... playing halo alone, while he hung out with his much older family and friends. I think it's just because I was on the groom's list, and would have felt even more left out if I wasn't there at all. Anyways, that first time with Halo 1 wasn't even close to my first Halo game (I'd played 4 and 5 to death, and have many awful memories of being clowned on by the neighborhood kids in SWAT matches of Halo: Reach), but that night was my first night with an Original Xbox, and I was immediately in love.
To me, the original Xbox controller is to Halo what the GameCube controller is to Smash Brothers for everyone else. That is to say, the only option. The Original Xbox controller's face button layout is convenient to the point that claw grips are way less necessary if you want to always hit all the buttons, the convex shape of the right stick makes for the most accurate stick aiming on basically any other controller, and the overall ergonomics are really more comfortable to me than any Xbox controller made after it.
The actual gameplay of Halo is immaculate. The gun balancing is perfect, every single weapon feels like a unique toy with an obvious purpose and playstyle. Every enemy serves a purpose, and needs to be handled differently. The level design is capable of incredible highs, with individual combat arenas leading to intricate dances with the enemy that are addicting to play through, and despite common complaints of "padding" and "re-use" of old areas, I find the missions where you return to previous levels to one degree or another to be very important for the atmosphere and pace the game wants to build. What starts as a steady paced campaign, with clear simple objectives, and a known enemy, shifts very quickly in the back half of the game into an insane mad dash, where you have shifting allegiances, constant new problems to solve, and end up being ping-ponged across the entire ring in a desperate scramble to get out alive. A major part of that back half's tension and atmosphere comes from seeing the world you explored early on become shredded into a hellish landscape within just a few hours as the flood spread across the ring.
Halo 2
Coming soon! I want to write more, but my hands are literally fucking killing me as I type this, and I need to stop for a while.