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I remember the first time I played Halo: Combat Evolved at a friend’s place. This friend was doing quite well for himself, and he had a big widescreen TV (this was still aspirational in 2001) and a fantastic surround sound system. The experience was totally enveloping. I remember playing one level — I think it was the start of The Silent Cartographer — and whirling Master Chief around in panic because I could hear a Covenant dropship landing right behind me. It wasn’t a dropship; it was my friend’s washer beginning its spin cycle.
When I think about Halo, which I have been doing this week due to the launch of the remake Halo: Campaign Evolved, the first thing I think about is how it sounds. There is no shortage of stuff in this game that you can pick out as an exemplar of its genius: the co-op support, the peerless gamefeel, the controversial but inspired two-weapon limit, the famous “30 seconds of fun” combat loop, the vehicles, and that majestic skybox, with the ringworld arcing into the heavens. But it’s always the audio I go back to.
Marty O’Donnell’s thumping, galloping theme music. The deep vwooop of Master Chief’s shield recharging. The thick, satisfying thwack of a melee blow. The 10-second story told when you unleash a full clip with the Needler: the thin rattle as the rounds shoot out, the way they whistle through the air to the target and smack home, the delayed, flat bang as they detonate, the clunk-clack of the reloading cartridge. And the greatest enemy barks in history, of course — the excitable, comic chatter of the Grunts, the Elites’ “worp worp worp,” simultaneously absurd and threatening.
I haven’t played the game in years, but I can summon this soundscape to mind instantly. I’d happily listen to a playthrough with my eyes closed, picturing the scene in my mind. There’s a profound physicality to Halo‘s sound effects that does so much to help the game feel tangible and real.
In the beginning, physicality was what Xbox was all about. I remember unpacking my own console a few months later. The thing was ugly as sin, but it had an impressive solidity and heft to it, and it came packed with audiophile-quality gold-plated cables for transmitting that sound and those visuals to your TV. It would never win a beauty pageant against the stylishly crisp PS2 or the adorable retro-futurism of the GameCube. But in build quality terms, it was playing a different ballgame. And, most importantly, it came with Halo.
This was a launch-game symbiosis of hardware and software on par with Super Mario World and the SNES. When Microsoft acquired Bungie, then known as a developer of interesting and modestly successful Mac games, and Halo, which was on its third iteration after periods as a strategy game and third-person action game, it seemed a leftfield choice. It proved to be a stroke of genius, rocketing Xbox to the top of the gamer-cred charts on its first try. (It’s strange to recall that Grand Theft Auto 3 came out at the same time and, initially anyway, didn’t seem as big of a deal.)
In our heads, Halo invented Xbox: the multiplayer rep, the technical proficiency, the defiantly uncool, green-tinged gamer aesthetic. It was proudly Western, proudly American, and a hostile takeover of the console space by a genre that (GoldenEye aside) had been mostly the preserve of PC gaming. Together, the game and the console carried a massive level of culture-shock risk, but in the end, they were undeniable.
I have yet to play Campaign Evolved, so I don’t yet know how much of Halo‘s seismic importance and divine inspiration is captured in the remake. I hear good things, but in the nicest possible way, I don’t care. It’s easy enough to play the game in its original form (if not quite in Bungie’s original code) in the Master Chief Collection, and there’s nothing about it that feels awkward or unplayable today. It will always be with us — one of gaming’s greatest bolts from the blue. Just thinking about it recharges the joy I take in this medium. Vwooooop.
