“Alien bastards” – Halo 2

The list of UK #1s in the year of the sequel, 2004, ends with a triple hit of sequels to the biggest breakthrough games of the decade to date, all of which largely lived up to expectations critically and commercially. Halo 2 aced the latter, entering narrowly behind Grand Theft Auto: Vice City in third place in the list of biggest first week sales ever. Its numbers were dwarfed by those of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas just before it, but in a way its popularity was even more startling. More than 6 million PS2s had been sold in the UK, and roughly one in ten of their owners bought San Andreas in its first weekend. For Halo 2 and Xbox owners, the equivalent figure was one in six.

When Microsoft entered the console market, buying out Bungie, the developers of an impressive-looking first person shooter called Halo, turned out to be a very important move. Bringing more of a PC-style shooter to console perfectly set them up with a unique proposition to a sizeable number of players, one which could fit with later moves like bringing a PC-style Star Wars RPG to console. 

Playing Halo 2, the comparison to the most popular console series in that FPS space, Medal of Honor, on PS2, is striking. Bungie’s game offers comparatively vast spaces, extremely smooth controls and a relentlessly fast pace. It fits perfectly with the Xbox’s high-end graphics and its controller with dual analogue sticks given pride of place and satisfying triggers to fire (including dual-wielding with one gun to each trigger). The sense of moment-to-moment spectacle is much greater. It ultimately has plenty of its own corridors, but does a much better job at disguising them, helped by its setting.

Its sci-fi trappings do a lot to make it feel fresh as well, though it’s fascinating how little they ultimately change. Getting to play at times as one of the alien enemy is the most startling new idea. During your time as the human Master Chief, being a supersoldier makes a lot more internal logical sense when encased in high-tech armour and supported by the kind of AI that might one day make it to reminding people of their appointments when they turn their computer on. But ultimately, you are still a soldier within a formalised and American-centred military, killing waves and waves of othered enemies. I found its action faintly empty, but it’s certainly easy to see its appeal.

The sheer scale of Halo 2’s appeal to Xbox owners wasn’t just as action, though, but also the relative lack of alternatives, and that importance to the console provided its own problems. With Halo such a success at the Xbox’s launch, Microsoft’s plan at one point was to time its sequel with the launch of Xbox Live, the online subscription service which was to prove critical to the future of Xbox. That was in 2002. Halo 2 ended up taking two years longer, and Bungie still had to cut out planned multiplayer features and a sizeable section of the planned single-player plot, leaving it with a cliffhanger ending and a big case of middle-part-of-trilogy syndrome.

Even with all those cuts, its development sounds nightmarish. Release date pressures dictated by the familiar foe of financial year-ends remained. The game’s composer Marty O’Donnell has described the final stages like this: “The end of Halo 2 was so horrible, I wasn’t sure if the team could stay together, it’d been such a grind. Relationships went, divorces happened.” In the same article, the phrases “death march” and “we had to kill ourselves to get it done” also come up from others. It’s sad to read Marcus Lehto still internalising failing to achieve the completely unreasonable as a failure on their part: “We were obsessed with detail and with quality overall, so whatever we were going to ship, we knew it was going to be something that played well. But we all knew what it could’ve been, had we actually had our shit together.”

The game’s focus on multiplayer meant that the pressure didn’t even ease up after release, with patches to put in place right away. “This game caused divorces” is both unacceptable and, sadly, far from rare, another exploitative approach reproduced across large parts of the industry. There is a grim basic assumption that some degree of excessive working practice is involved in the majority of games made to any scale. The fact that I haven’t read about the creation processes of Final Fantasy VIII or The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker causing divorces doesn’t mean that they didn’t. I can’t promise that I will always acknowledge this kind of thing. But this particular moment, in a year full of blockbuster games taking the industry to new heights of success, driven by the new entry of massive corporations bringing a different level of pressure, and setting the scene for more modern times, it feels necessary to do so.

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Top of the charts for week ending 13 November 2004:

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