No longer is a 10-hour storyline followed by a breezy multiplayer mode enough. The FPS scene is shifting too, with the rise of eSports. Activision’s annual Call of Duties are among the most expensively marketed entertainment products ever made, and the genre-splicing Destiny is made by Bungie, a studio whose nous and skill neither time nor success have dulled. The console-based first-person shooter (FPS), which Halo both defined and popularised, has become one of the most valuable creative real estate in video games.
It’s not the only question Halo’s current developer, 343 Industries (a company named after one of the series’ characters and which, until 2012, had only been allowed to re-master Bungie’s classic work) has been forced to reckon with. Can he save a beleaguered video game system? Master Chief routinely saves the universe. The Xbox One has lost considerable ground to Sony’s PlayStation 4, which is seen by many as the superior, cheaper and, in its vibrant sweep of games, more relevant machine. Sixteen years later, Microsoft hopes Master Chief can repeat that trick with Halo 5. The company has sold more than 65m Halo games, and almost as many Xbox consoles on which to play them. The game, Microsoft hoped, would legitimise the machine. Two years later, Halo launched alongside Microsoft’s Xbox console, a piece of hardware that was seen as a folly from a company that had no business in video games beyond flight sims and solitaire. Within a year, the space marine, his game and Bungie, the company behind it all, were sold to Microsoft. Chief padded on to the screen behind Jobs, a symbol of Apple’s nascent gaming ambitions. The lights dimmed and Halo’s melancholic choral refrain sounded in the background. In 1999, Steve Jobs paced the Macworld Conference stage proclaiming that the video-game footage he was about to show was the “coolest” he’d seen. M aster Chief was first introduced to the world, not by Microsoft, but by Apple.
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