Halo: The Greatest Game Series of All
Every single year, video game sites give their annual “Best Games of the Year” posts. Every ten, it’s the “Top Ten Games of the Decade”. In short, people love to throw around the words “best of all time” quite often, and I am certainly one of them.
But it is a hard thing to do. If you take a look at GameRankings’ top list, you can see that it is about as good as Rotten Tomatoes or IMDB are for weighing the worth of a film. Why? Because the criteria used to evaluate the concept of “the greatest games” are subjective rather than objective, and we end up with a lot of games where simple nostalgia dominates.
So what is the greatest video game series of all time? If you ask me, it is an easy decision to make.
Halo.
So now I’ve lost readers. “Oh, no… another Halo fanboy”. Yeah, pretty much.
What is Halo?
Halo is a record-setting science fiction video game franchise created by Bungie and owned and published by Microsoft Game Studios. The series centers on the interstellar war between humanity and a theocratic alliance of aliens known as the Covenant. The Covenant worship an ancient civilization known as the Forerunners, who perished in combat with the parasitic Flood. In this setting, the term “Halo” refers to Halo megastructures: large, habitable ringed structures, similar to the Orbitals in Iain M Banks’ Culture novels, or to smaller versions of Larry Niven’s Ringworld.
The series has been praised as being among the best first-person shooters on a video game console, and are considered the Microsoft Xbox’s “killer app”. This has led to the term “Halo killer” being used to describe console games that aspire, or are considered, to be better than Halo. Fueled by the success of Halo: Combat Evolved, and immense marketing campaigns from publisher Microsoft, its sequels went on to break various sales records. Halo 3 sold more than US$170 million worth of copies in the first twenty-four hours of release, breaking the record set by Halo 2 three years prior. Halo: Reach, in turn, broke the record set by Halo 3, selling $200 million USD worth of copies on its first day.The games have sold over 34 million copies worldwide, and all Halo merchandise has grossed more than $1.7 billion.
Strong sales of the games led to the franchise’s expansion to other mediums; there are multiple bestselling novels, graphic novels, and other licensed products. Beyond the original trilogy, other “Halo” games have branched off into other video game genres, including Halo Wars, a real-time strategy game produced as developer Ensemble Studios‘ last project. Bungie also contributed the expansion Halo 3: ODST and a prequel Halo: Reach, their last project for the franchise. Much of the series’ award-winning music was composed by Martin O’Donnell and his partner Michael Salvatori; soundtracks have been released for all games in the series. The cultural impact of the Halo series has been compared by writer Brian Bendis to that of Star Wars. The collective group of fans of the series is referred to as the “Halo Nation”.
Inspiration
The Halo series draws inspiration from films like Aliens, Star Wars and Tron, as well as books like Armor, Consider Phlebas and Ringworld – and these inspirations help to give this saga a deep, rich background unlike any other.
Impact
Halo forever changed the first-person shooter genre by proving that hardcore FPS games could not only work, but work better on home game consoles. The series revolutionized multiplayer gaming in such a way that every serious gaming title after Halo 2 was affected in profound ways.
The Games
Halo: Combat Evolved - Released on November 15th, 2001
Halo: Combat Evolved takes place in the far future where mankind is locked into a brutal war against a race of aliens known as the Covenant. These dudes are seriously evil. They wipe out entire planets at a time, and they are so fast at doing so that we poor humans are unable to get much information on them before they nuke us into oblivion.
The horde of aliens is getting closer and closer to Earth with the clock quickly ticking down before they completely annihilate our race. Finally the line is drawn. In a massive battle near a human planet, only one ship survives: Pillar of Autumn. The commander of the ship decides to lure the Covenant as far away from Earth as possible so she programs the ship’s AI to jump to some random location in the opposite direction of the home system.
Eventually the ship arrives at a distant location where they find both a gas giant called Threshold and its small moon known as Basis. This wouldn’t be so strange except for the fact that they find a giant ring construct floating between the two objects, which is about 10,000 miles in diameter. Unfortunately for the small ship, the entire Covenant battle fleet had followed them and arrived in the system shortly before…
Halo 2 – Released on November 9th, 2004
The most coveted aspect of Halo 2 in Bungie’s three years of development has been the storyline. Halo was a game about exploring a single ring, and in that it’s like the movie Alien. Halo 2 is like Aliens. The first Alien movie was about learning the parameters of a single creature. The second movie was an onslaught of aliens, multiple plots and sub-plots, and conspiracies. It was bigger in scope and more encompassing in its ambition than the first. Halo 2 is a massive expansion of the original story in every aspect. The story is more complex, and to a much greater extent than its predecessor it’s more vast, more mysterious, and ultimately, a much meatier one. Just like Aliens, it is bigger in scope and more encompassing in ambition than its predecessor.
Halo 3 – Released on September 25th, 2007
When last we left Master Chief, he was headed towards Earth, determined to stop the Prophet of Truth and his cadre of Brutes from destroying the universe in a blaze of zealotry. Cortana had been captured by the Gravemind, a disgusting creature intimately tied to the Flood. The Arbiter and his Elites, once bitter enemies of humankind had made an uneasy truce in order to conquer a greater evil. Frankly, things didn’t look so hot for Earth and its inhabitants. The story eschews some of the ambiguity of Halo 2 and tells a more straightforward narrative. Events play out like a sci-fi action blockbuster.
Halo Wars – Released on February 26th, 2009
Bungie Studios had spent the last decade refining its winning formula for first-person shooter success with the Halo series, and for the first time, a non-Bungie development studio has tried its hand at expanding the series in the form of Halo Wars, a real-time strategy game set in the universe popularized by the enigmatic Master Chief. And although Spartan warrior John-117 doesn’t appear in the game, developer Ensemble Studios has otherwise closely followed Bungie’s formula for success.
Halo has always been about intense bursts of run-and-gun gameplay with pretty graphics and a robust and addictive multiplayer component, all wrapped up in a compelling story. Rather than strike out on its own with an approach more akin to its wide-open Age of Empires series of real-time strategy games, Ensemble stuck to the Bungie formula in Halo Wars. Missions are tightly designed, the action moves constantly forward, and momentum isn’t bogged down with complex technology trees, multiple buildings and resource gathering operations. Because of this, Halo Wars serves almost as a “my-first-RTS” rather than as a Halo-ization of more traditional strategy offerings like AoE, Starcraft and Command & Conquer.
Halo 3: ODST – Released on September 22nd, 2009
It began as an idea for a simple expansion to Halo 3. It would be just a few hours long and help tide the fans over until Halo: Reach was ready in late 2010. That little idea grew to be so much more. The end result was a package that no Halo fan should be without, as it is the definition of fan service. You got a six hour campaign that expands the boundaries of what to expect in a Halo game, an excellent new cooperative mode called Firefight, and an entire second disc filled with adversarial maps. This isn’t a full-blown sequel, which might disappoint some people, but you’d do well to take it for what it is: another great game from Bungie.
In many ways, Halo 3: ODST is a return to the roots of the Halo franchise. Master Chief – with his magical healing Spartan armor, mockery of gravity, and dual wielding ways – is sitting this one out. Instead, you’ll take the role of the Orbital Drop Shock Trooper, or ODST.
Though the ODSTs handle like the Halo of yore, the rest of the campaign is as fresh and exciting as you could hope for. With Master Chief on the sidelines, Bungie has scrapped its traditional galactic romp in favor of a focused, character driven tale. The result is one of the most satisfying Halo storylines yet and a great step forward for the franchise.
Halo: Reach – Released on September 14, 2010
Master Chief is out. This time you’ll step into the shoes of Noble 6, a nameless hero for players to project themselves onto. Noble 6 doesn’t even have a defined gender. Thanks to a deep new customization system, you’re free to fit Noble 6′s look to your personality.
Noble 6′s tale begins with an introduction to Planet Reach. This colony is the center of humanity’s military might, and home to the Spartan program that produced Master Chief himself. The events of Halo: Reach take place as a prequel to the main Halo trilogy and – though they take small liberties with Halo: The Fall of Reach (a 2001 science fiction novel by Eric Nylund) – help to tell the story of the events that lead up to events of Halos 1 through 3. The war with the Covenant is already raging, and things don’t look good for us humans.
Noble 6 is the rookie member of Noble Team, a squad of Spartans stationed on Reach. You’ll get to know each of the other team members through the course of Halo: Reach as you work with them to complete various missions, but the action always follows Noble 6′s adventure.
This is the most straightforward and enjoyable tale of destruction the franchise has yet to produce. And don’t worry if you haven’t played the other Halo games yet – though Reach will feel a lot deeper and more compelling to longtime Halo fans, it can stand on its own as a self-contained story. The tale starts out simple enough, but it quickly escalates to stunning set pieces before pulling out all the stops. The last third of the game is just one big thrill ride, and the revelations that occur during that part of the game are sure to make any Halo buff go ballistic.
The Voices
Keith David, Ron Perlman, Robert Davi, Terence Stamp, Julie Benz, Jonathan Ross, Nathan Fillion, Adam Baldwin, Alan Tudyk, Katee Sackhoff, Tricia Helfer, Miguel Ferrer, John Michael Higgins, David Cross, Orlando Jones, Laura Prepon, Dee Bradley Baker, Debra Wilson Skelton, Aisha Tyler, Greg Grunberg, Patrick Gallagher, and Michelle Rodriguez are the celebrity voices which add to making such an amazing experience.
More Stuff
And Halo isn’t “just” video games. The list goes on and on! There are soundtracks, novels, several comic series, toys, statues, an anime, hats, t-shirts, posters, calendars, shot glasses, and wallets.
Guinness
A list by the Guinness World Records shows that Halo is the most loved videogame franchise of all time. The list was compiled by Guinness after more than 13,000 readers voted online for their favorite videogames. Voting took place between January and August 2009, so any big launch made after that point had little impact on the chart.
Halo was chosen based on the strengths of the first three videogames in the series. Gaz Deaves, who is the gaming editor working on the Guinness World Records, says, “We decided to take a different approach with this list than we did in the previous edition. Instead of asking developers, industry insiders and journalists to rank their favorite titles, we approached a different kind of expert: the players themselves! We are confident that this ‘top 50′ more accurately reflects the tastes of the average gamer and not just the critics.”
Wrapping it up
Halo means so much to so many people. This is not extraordinary in the culture of videogames. What’s exceptional is how many different things it means to those players. For me Halo has always been a social experience, with lifelong friendships forged over a shared love of the game. Some hop online to randomly test their merit in competitive matches. Others find themselves lost in the fiction, playing through the campaign alone and then poring over the extended story in books and anime. Still others look to Halo for a creative outlet as level forgers or machinima producers. This range in how we play Halo is a testament to how feature-rich development studio Bungie has made the franchise, and Halo: Reach is the ultimate punctuation on a decade’s work.
There’s no first-person shooter on 360 that can equal the Halo series’ blend of cinematic action, adrenaline-pumping shootouts, and male-and female-bonding gameplay. Halo has even been described as a series that “has reinvented a genre that didn’t know it needed to be reinvented”.
And is it over? Not by a long shot. Even now, Microsoft’s 323 Studios is hiring for a “Halo project”. A lot of rumors are out there as to what this project may be, but one thing is for sure – the Halo series will never truly die.
