It all started with a game called Blam! (Exclamation point included.) Hundreds of humans, aliens, and soldiers called Spartans fought it out on massive, foreign battlefields on the monitors of a Chicago-based computer-game development studio. It’s nearly inconceivable that 10-plus years later, and with over 40 million copies of Halo games sold worldwide, one fictional, faceless green supersoldier would help establish a whole new home console from Microsoft and ascend to the elite of gaming superstardom among the likes of Mario and Donkey Kong.

“When I remember [the lead-up to the launch of Xbox], the game that we were really excited about…that had the most internal buzz was Oddworld: Munch’s Oddysee,” says Phil Spencer, corporate VP of Microsoft studios. “I think a lot of people really felt it was going to help cement us, because Oddworld had such a great track-record.”

With Halo: Combat Evolved developer Bungie new to consoles, Spencer admits “it was unclear how these Mac/PC guys were going to make the jump [to Xbox]. People knew the FPS genre could be very important to us, but it was unclear if we were going to land it [with their game]. At the time, Munch’s had the largest internal forecast. A lot of people were hanging their success on that game — I mean, I think Munch’s Oddysee turned into a fine game, but clearly Halo became the breakout success.”

That’s an understatement. 2001’s Halo: Combat Evolved went on to spawn a whole generation of shooters and gamers weaned on regenerating shields, full-fledged community fan support, and seamless online console multiplayer.

It’s fair to say that if Master Chief hadn’t stepped out of that cryogenic tube to take on the Covenant way back in November 2001, gaming would be a very different place today.

WHAT COULD'VE BEEN
As any avid Halo fan already knows, Combat Evolved didn’t happen overnight…and it didn’t even begin life as a first-person shooter. It went through multiple phases between when the concept started taking shape all the way back in 1996 and its final form as the game we know and love today. Most importantly, it started as a point-and-click–style real-time strategy game, with neither hide nor hair of Master Chief or the alien ringworld that would give the series its name. But there were soldiers named Spartans… lots of them.

Two years later, the RTS had morphed into a third-person action game more closely resembling what Halo would become. In this form, there were multiple “Master Chief”–like models, different characters were controllable, and vehicles played a big part in scooting around a gameworld that now featured Halo rings. The Master Chief models were less like the current incarnation of the MJOLNIR-clad hero, sporting a slimmer frame with a gunbelt and a rifle slung over their shoulders. The most interesting gem from this early version of Halo was a small, dinghy-like craft that could navigate open water and take on any enemies found swimming around in the wet stuff.

Fast forward to 1999, when Bungie gave E3 tradeshow attendees a behind-closed-doors glimpse of its long-simmering shooter. “[The reveal video] captured this epic feel of the world and the [Halo ring],” says Ed Fries, the former-head of Microsoft Game Studios instrumental in Microsoft’s acquisition of Bungie and the Halo series in 2000. “It had a whole bunch of stuff that never made it into the game.”

One of those touches: a flourishing world full of alien wildlife and dinosaur-like creatures. (We wouldn’t see these types of native species wandering the landscapes of Halo until Halo: Reach, with its flocks of peaceful Moa and scary, lumbering Gúta.) And it’s at this early stage that Microsoft sat up and took notice; the rest is, as they say, Xbox and console-gaming history.