Regulus and Wolfy1619: B.net Happiness Brigade
Every time you get angry on B.net, God kills Shishka.
Please, think of Shishka.
Many thanks to Duardo for pinning this topic!
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Ahoy, dudes!
Don't let my two-week-old Bnet profile fool you. I've been a fan of Bungie since the Dark Times (AKA Chicago). At the tender age of six, Gnop! was the first video game I ever played. Raised on the likes of Marathon while my friends were still bugging out over Doom, I grew up with an insatiable appetite for enigmatic story puzzles, obnoxiously clever AI supervillains and frog blasting vent cores.
So you can imagine my excitement when Jason Jones revealed Halo during Steve Jobs's keynote at the 1999 Macworld Expo New York. This was the game I'd been waiting for; the team-based shooter to dethrone Tribes (another addiction of mine) and finally give Mac owners a game to equal the PC.
Of course, the Halo that sold a million Xboxen (yes, that's the plural and I'm sticking to it) is a very different beast. Thus, I decided to put together an informative superthread collecting all the screens and videos worth seeing of Halo's early stages, before Microsoft, before the Xbox and, most importantly, before the recovery of Ling Ling's head.
Onward!
PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT: The servers containing most of the files linked in this post are a bit wobbly, so don't be too shocked if they lock up on you. I have compiled all the material into one massive zip file, which you can grab here:
Zip Archive on MegaUpload (301 MB)
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SCREENSHOTS (HOSTED ON NIKON.BUNGIE.ORG)
The First Official Screenshots
Bungie released these images between July 21 and October 5, 1999. They represent Halo already in its second incarnation, having been scrapped internally as a sci-fi RTS to follow Myth II. This version of Halo was planned to be primarily non-linear, consisting of missions scattered across the seamless ring construct and boasting some of the largest team-based multiplayer maps ever witnessed. It was among the first Mac games to push the limits of OpenGL on the platform, and remained visually impressive well after other games had caught up. The Covenant Elites in these images are based on an early design that was eventually scrapped, while some elements of the older MJOLNIR armor were later worked into the ODST Marines first seen in Halo 2.
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Screenshots From Other Sources
Once the word was out, the gaming press swarmed all over Halo. Magazines and websites scrambled for exclusive coverage, and soon new images began to find their way out of Bungie's offices (still in Chicago at the time) and into gamers' imaginations.
Next Generation Magazine: December 1999 (best available scans)
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IGN.com: January 6, 2000
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Incite.com (now defunct): January 7, 2000
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GameStar.de: January 24, 2000
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Haloplayers.com (now defunct): March 10, 2000
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GameStar.de: April 1, 2000
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GameCenter.com (now owned by GameSpot): April 28, 2000
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PC Accelerator Magazine: May 2000 (best available scans)
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The Big Redesign
E3 2000 saw Halo undergo a major graphical overhaul, bringing the game remarkably close in appearance to the version that eventually landed on Microsoft's fledgling console. The Elites have been redesigned, and the Master Chief's MJOLNIR Mark V armor is nearly finalized; the only apparent difference from the release version is a more saturated color palette. At this stage, the game was still believed to be a third-person, team-based multiplayer affair, if not quite so ambitious as the original concept. Shortly after E3, however, Microsoft announced its imminent purchase of Bungie Studios, and Halo soon transformed into a linear first-person shooter and multimillion-selling Xbox launch title.
GameCenter.com (now owned by GameSpot): April 28, 2000
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Blue's News: June 19, 2000
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Computer Games Online (now defunct): July 13-15, 2000
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PC Gamer Magazine: August 2000 (best available scans)
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*CONTINUED IN SECOND POST*
[Edited on 10.12.2009 9:17 AM PDT]
