Spotify and fellow music streaming services have killed the Greatest Hits album. People can listen to a group’s most famous songs together whenever they like; why would they bother waiting for them to be compiled? It was a good run of a few decades for the concept before that. The video games equivalent, currently at peak strength, is the comprehensive remastered compilation. The next one I’ll meet on Super Chart Island is a Halo collection. The comparative difficulty of playing old games makes such compilations a more worthwhile prospect, although the industry’s own move online is starting to affect that. Two old Call of Duty games making it to the UK’s top 5 bestselling games for July 2023 suggests a different future there too.
For about as long as there were Greatest Hits albums, there were new songs recorded for Greatest Hits albums. Ideally, these new songs would be great, become massive hits in their own right, and seamlessly continue a successful career, a la Abba or Earth, Wind & Fire. At the other end of the spectrum comes the sad final full stop flop, like the Spice Girls’ sequence-breaking “Headlines”.
In between comes the kind of song which was a deliberate reminder of past glories at the tail end of the most popular phase of an ongoing career. There were a few of them from ‘80s acts around the turn of the millennium: Pet Shop Boys’ “Miracles”; U2’s “Sweetest Thing”. And the ur-example of this sort of thing, R.E.M.’s “Bad Day” for their 2003 Greatest Hits album In Time. “Bad Day” was newly released and sounded modern, it was a hit and not their last… and even casual listeners couldn’t help but be reminded of ‘80s R..E.M. and “It’s the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine)”.
Halo: Reach is an entire new game produced by Bungie, and was the fastest-selling Halo game in the UK to date. It also has the unmistakable ring of a new Greatest Hits song to its backwards-looking finality, and not just because Bungie had already announced their move away from the series and into a new deal with Activision. It’s a prequel but it’s less a chance to reset like Halo 3: ODST and more a way to celebrate the familiar from a new angle. In-world and out-of-world, Halo: Reach it is a trip to the past, wrapped up in the present.
“Bad Day” sounded steeped in the past for a reason. R.E.M. updated a then-unreleased song they’d written in the ‘80s, a first draft of sorts for “It’s the End of the World…”. Likewise, in producing a prequel for Halo, Bungie looked back at their own past, taking enemy designs from concept sketches for the original first game. New weapons build on old ones, like the needler rifle that adds a more powerful but trickier twist to the pink needler of past games.
You don’t play as Master Chief, which given his centrality to the series feels like it should be a big change. Your more modest character has to regenerate health with healing packs like some antique game, and the whole army doesn’t exist as your personal cheerleader troupe. Any increased vulnerability is very much set off by the insurance policy of a regenerating shield, though, and you can still punch aliens to death in much the same way as the man himself. Halo: Reach has far from the worst shooter implementation of making you just one member of a squad, but the feeling is not much of a step change.
Instead, it succeeds on the same things as its predecessors, and on doing them just a bit bigger. Quick movement, power at your fingertips waiting to be channelled in different ways, battlefields set up with vehicles and big guns and lots of emergent routes to victory. A story that confidently hits all its familiar beats without making you wait around too much. New things like jetpacks are a bit of extra showing off rather than anything that changes things too fundamentally. A victory lap like this is not something that you can pull off more than once. Once was a treat, though, and someone else was going to be left working out where the hits were going to come from afterwards.
Top of the charts for week ending 18 September 2010:
