A long-forgotten piece of Halo history is officially coming back, and will be playable for the first time in the franchise’s history to celebrate Halo 2’s 20th anniversary.
Back in 2003, following the release of the wildly successful Halo: Combat Evolved in 2001, expectations were high for both Microsoft and Halo developer Bungie.
At E3 2023, Bungie showed off an extended gameplay segment of Halo 2 and the rest is history, as the hype the showcase generated would doubtlessly end up being part of the reason that Halo 2 would go on to become the best-selling game in the original Xbox’s library with over 8 million copies sold.
Funny thing about that Halo 2 E3 conference though; none of what was shown off actually made it into the game.
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That demo build, the mission itself and even the engine it used never actually ended up being used in the full release of the game, although the mission itself obviously resembles a couple of other missions that ended up being featured in Halo 2’s campaign.
Well, thanks to the team at Halo Studios and some extremely talented modders, the E3 build of Halo 2 has been recovered and remade in Halo: The Master Chief Collection.
As Danielle Partis on the Xbox Wire blog explains, this was no easy task.
“Several snags with technology have kept this demo locked away for many years, however, thanks to the work of the Digsite data archaeology archive and valiant efforts from the wider Halo community, the original assets and files were able to be recovered. But it wasn’t all smooth sailing from there either – the demo was built in a version of the Halo engine that no longer exists, and the assets were not compatible with any other existing versions of Halo 2.”
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If you’re curious about trying it out for yourself, it sounds like the Halo 2 E3 build will be exclusive to the Steam version of Halo: The Master Chief Collection, and will be dropping at the end of the week on the 9th of November (which is, as you might have guessed, Halo 2’s birthday).