By April 2002, a million copies had been sold.Īs the sales figures mounted, Bungie knew that Halo wasn't just a game any more. Half of all Xbox consoles sold for months after launch were sold alongside a copy of Halo. Halo launched in November 2001, and was a critical and commercial success of almost unprecedented scale - achieving one of the highest Metacritic scores in history, with almost universal acclaim from reviewers (Eurogamer is mocked to this day for awarding it 8/10, the "low" score probably reflecting the site's roots in PC FPS gaming more than anything else). They didn't, of course, and the rest is history. Expectations were so low that the Microsoft marketing people were talking about putting their money behind other launch titles." "We had some early previews with really bad framerate, a lot of disappointment that we had changed platforms, and an enormous amount of scepticism that you could make a good FPS on a console. "We were under pressure to prove ourselves and the game," he recalls. Today, Halo: Combat Evolved is remembered as being the tentpole that supported the whole Xbox launch, the cornerstone around which Microsoft built its entire console business - but Jaime Griesemer, who was a design lead on Halo 2, says that at the time, things weren't so certain. Its hero, the Master Chief, is an iconic figure in pop culture, and the series is one of the most popular online games in history - with Halo 3 still being played by huge numbers of people every night, despite the meteoric success of games like Modern Warfare. These days, updates to Bungie's epic science fiction franchise punctuate the release schedule for the Xbox 360 like exclamation points - it's a pillar of the platform, the game series that brought credibility to both the Xbox itself and to the Xbox Live service. ![]() ![]() It's hard to remember that there was a time when Halo wasn't a colossus of the games industry.
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