There Will Never Be Another Video Game Launch Like Halo 3 – TheGamer

Halo 3 is a wonderful relic of its time. The last truly great game from Bungie, and the end of an era for a legendary character before he was revived time and time again in games which had only a fraction of the impact. The original trilogy told a self-contained story that captured the imagination of millions around the world, simultaneously keeping the Xbox brand alive as it catapulted Microsoft’s console into the stratosphere.

I remember the launch well, even if I was too young to get together with friends for massive LAN parties fueled by fried food and Mountain Dew. Instead, my brother and I had our mum pick up a copy while we were at school, and we came home for a weekend where our single goal was to finish the fight as quickly as possible. We stayed up all night, and I’ll never forget that final warthog run at the campaign’s end, followed by solemn speculation about whether Master Chief was alive or dead.

That was all we knew back then, and part of me misses the simplicity of enjoying a game for what it was instead of waiting for updates, patches, expansions, and for the internet to claim it was ultimately a disappointment. Halo 3 superseded all of those notions and was a perfect storm of a stunning solo campaign, legendary multiplayer, and a cornerstone of pop culture that saw video games breach the mainstream in a celebratory way I still recall fondly.

While I could harp on about my nostalgia for Halo 3 until the cows come home, I want to talk about how it represents a fundamental transition in the world of video games. How we sat on the precipice of the digital world as we bid farewell to the analog technology we were raised with as millennials. Smartphones and tablets weren’t a thing when Halo 3 came out, and the internet was still adopting social media platforms as it moved away from outdated forums and began launching streaming services for the very first time. It was a wild time, and much of the world was changing at an unparalleled rate, with video games taken along for the ride.

The Xbox 360 didn’t launch with support for HDMI, because the display technology was still in its infancy and the majority of gamers were still playing away on archaic CRT screens. It wasn’t until later models of the console that this preset became commonplace and games began to take proper advantage of the increased resolution and image quality.

Dead Rising had an agonisingly small font that didn’t work on older displays, while Halo 3’s menus and user interface were bulky because Bungie was trying to reach the biggest audience possible, and most of them were nowhere near upgrading to HD televisions. It makes the time period feel oddly fleeting, and it’s strange to look back on it because so much has changed.

Entire generations have been born and have gotten into video games since Halo 3 came into the world, and the definition of video games I was raised on has evolved into a state of being that is almost unrecognisable. Halo is still around in the form of Infinite, but lags behind as it tries and fails to recapture a past where battle passes, live service games, and similar things just didn’t exist. Now they do, Master Chief simply can’t hang with the best of them.

The ways we play and enjoy games has also changed massively, and people are no longer reliant on consoles and PCs to get their gaming fix. Now there’s mobile, streaming services, and people who don’t even play games, but instead consume them through streamers and content creators. Many of these things were beginning to develop at the time of Halo 3, but there was no predicting where they would land almost two decades later. People have been born and grown up with no knowledge or context of the landscape Halo 3 originated in. For them, its release is an event in video game history and nothing more.

You probably think I should stop looking dreamily back on the past and get on with my life, but I don’t believe remembering is a detriment when it continues to inform my future so drastically. The world of video games has changed completely since 2007, with games taking longer and being more expensive to make than ever, while live service games have altered our own playing habits and how we perceive the time and money we put into the medium. We all expect more, move on quickly, and constantly await the next big thing despite abundant future classics being released each and every month.

I miss the anticipation for Halo 3 and the collective excitement we all felt for a video game that was just that, and didn’t try to extend its lifespan beyond the stars or try and be a thing that it clearly wasn’t. Bungie’s magnum opus is still celebrated to this day, not only because of how it reminds us of a simpler time, but how it represents a changing tide in the medium, and how, after its success, things were never the same again.

Halo 3

In Halo 3, Master Chief must again battle the Covenant and the Flood, this time rounding off the trilogy with a battle to end all battles.