How do you follow up a phenomenon? A game that revolutionized a genre and legitimized a new entry into the console space? A game that set sales records and was praised as one of the finest games of the year and maybe all time? How do you make a sequel to that? This was the question facing Bungie Studios as they began to formulate the follow up to Halo: Combat Evolved, the blockbuster launch title for the original Xbox. They knew it wouldn’t be easy, but they had no way of knowing just how difficult it would be.

Halo: Combat Evolved had been difficult itself. After years as little more than an experiment, most of the game had been thrown together in 9 months after the studio had been bought by Microsoft and moved from Chicago to Seattle. They had to contend with the sale and the move while making the most high profile exclusive for Microsoft’s first foray into the console business, the Xbox. The game had to be there for the launch and it had to be good. While it was widely loved and lauded by the public, people inside the development house were well aware of everything that had been cut from it in the frantic dash to meet the console’s release. A bunch of missions had been cut, entire alien races were nowhere to be found, and multiplayer was a shell of what was intended, due both to time constraints and the delay of the Xbox’s online capability. But Bungie was settled in now. They had time, experience, and a lot of ideas. So many ideas. Halo 2 was going to be bigger than Halo: Combat Evolved; way bigger.

Work on Halo: Combat Evolved had essentially ended in October 2001, but it had been such a crunch that many in the studio were given lengthy vacations. Those that didn’t spend time away scattered to work on various projects. The first game was still slated to come out in Europe and Japan the following year so some people worked on localizing it for those regions. A small team had been working on a game code-named Phoenix before being dragged into Halo development. After that game shipped, they took about a week off before heading back into project Phoenix. Before being bought by Microsoft, Bungie had created a development studio in San Jose called Bungie West that created the game Oni. They, too, had been wrangled into working on Halo, helping to salvage the multiplayer. As a reward for this, they had been promised the chance to make a new game. After Halo shipped, they got to work on a project called Monster Hunter. It would not get far before it was canceled and the team reintegrated with the Halo team.

One thing nobody really thought about was an online-enabled version of Halo: Combat Evolved; a Halo 1.5 as the press dubbed it. Despite widespread speculation in the public, Bungie never seriously considered making such a game, though some at Microsoft wanted it. Xbox hardware and third-party games head J Allard, in particular, wanted the developer to have Halo 1.5 or an online-enabled expansion ready to go for the launch of Xbox Live[1]. Bungie gave it little thought and Xbox first-party games executive Ed Fries backed them up.

“Your initial goals with a sequel are always the same: to finish all the stuff you had to cut from the first game. And we had to cut a lot from Halo 1, so we had a lot of ideas we were ready to move on.” — Designer Jaime Griesemer

Pre-production

Initial discussions on a sequel, codenamed Prophets after the new race of aliens slated to be included, began about six weeks after Halo: Combat Evolved shipped. There was practically enough cut from that game to be its a sequel on its own, but Bungie took that and added even more to it. Everyone had ideas about what could be added or changed, but there was little in the way of an overall vision. Company co-founder and Halo: Combat Evolved project lead Jason Jones had never liked working on sequels but felt he owed it to the team to work on Halo 2 since he’d convinced them to move to Seattle. He wouldn’t be as much of a presence in the early days of development and would be more interested in Phoenix. Instead, each core team began plunging forward with what they wanted to work on, with little communication between them.

Engineering was excited at the prospect of creating a new engine with the knowledge of the Xbox they’d gained during the making of the first Halo. On that game, they’d been flying by the seat of their pants because of the switch from PC to console, the compressed development timeline, and the unfinished nature of the console itself. But for Halo 2 they had time and a finished box to develop on. And they had ideas for how to use them. Halo: Combat Evolved used normal maps sparingly and mostly in environments since they were added to the engine late in development. Normal maps, also known as bump maps, are a way to get textures to appear to have depth. Halo 2 was going to have them everywhere. This would allow for more detailed looking objects at lower polygon counts. The programmers also planned to beef up lighting in-game by implementing stencil shadows and self-shadowing. The effects were expensive, engine power-wise, but were in vogue for new games. A couple of engineers mocked up how this would work by adding stencil shadows to Halo: Combat Evolved in what they called the “pstencil” test.

The story team wanted to greatly expand the Halo universe and take it far beyond the small, Alien-inspired narrative of the original. Jason Jones collected his ideas for a sequel and brought them to the story team who used them to create a sprawling, location hopping story that would see the Master Chief fend off an attack on Earth, chase the Covenant to another Halo, then take the fight to the Covenant homeworld before concluding back on Earth. It would introduce the controlling race of the Covenant, the Prophets, aliens who had once been planned for the first Halo but cut. And it would do something radical: for multiple missions, it would have the player take control of a warrior of the Covenant, dubbed the Dervish after a title in a sect of Islam. He was the brainchild of writer and director of cinematics Joseph Staten. Staten was fascinated by the story of the member of the Covenant who had been in charge of safeguarding the first Halo. He wondered what would happen to him after his failure in that game?

Gameplay designers brainstormed new things to add to the Halo formula. The pistol in the first Halo had gotten an “after-the-final-minute” tweak for the single-player that changed how the designers wanted it to play in multiplayer. As an experiment, designer Jaime Griesemer took the pistol in the game’s files and replaced the model with that of the Assault Rifle, leaving all other characteristics of the pistol in place, such as the fire rate and damage. He didn’t think it felt that much overpowered when it was a rifle instead of a pistol. So he decided to change things for Halo 2. The pistol would essentially be replaced with a battle rifle and the assault rifle would be replaced by a submachine gun. Bungie also decided to let the player handle the Covenant Energy Sword, a widely requested feature from fans of the first game. There was also the possibility to add more vehicles, like a Covenant counterpart to the Warthog, a single-player ATV, or a human flying craft. And there were a bunch of ideas of things to add to the core gameplay loop. Dual-wielding weapons, sprinting, leaning from behind corners, and melee combos were all brought up and prototyped[2].

Multiplayer would also be significantly beefed up. The big obvious addition was online play over Xbox Live. While Microsoft had announced an online service before the launch of the Xbox itself, it wasn’t going to be ready to go until the fall of 2002. At first, the plan for Halo 2 was to ditch the game modes of the first Halo and instead revisit an idea from the early development of the first game for a 32 player asymmetrical, objective, round-based game between humans and Covenant that the studio dubbed Warfare mode. The multiplayer in the original game had nearly been cut just weeks before the game shipped and nobody at the studio expected many people to take to it, especially considering the difficulty to experience it with more than 4 total players. As it became clear that the first game’s multiplayer suite was a hit, it was decided that the “party game,” as some at that company called the original suite, would be included alongside the big new mode. Only Max Hoberman, a member of the community team at the time, was attached to it initially. He fought for more resources and soon got artist Chris Carney as a reinforcement.

Supporting all of this was the art team. With the galaxy-spanning campaign and a huge suite of multiplayer options, they had a daunting task. They quickly got to work figuring out what the Covenant homeworld would be or how Earth would look in the Halo universe. And those were just two of the environments they had to design. There were space stations orbiting Earth, a new halo ring, and a moon strewn with the debris of the first halo. They also hammered away at creating concepts for the new weapons and vehicles the gameplay people thought up. Several new alien species were designed, like the noble-looking but corrupt Prophets and the strong, hulking Brutes.

In the spring of 2002, composer and audio director Martin O’Donnell had a meeting with Microsoft brass about releasing the music he and his partner Michael Salvatori had composed for the first game. In the meeting was Nile Rodgers, legendary musician and founder of Sumthing Else Music Works, a company that distributed video game soundtracks. He’d discovered Halo when the band he was producing, Maroon 5, kept skipping out of the recording studio to play the game. Impressed with the music, he got in touch with Microsoft so his company could distribute it. He approached O’Donnell and mentioned that he could get any number of famous musicians to appear on the soundtrack for Halo 2.

Bungie was internally looking to release the game in late 2003, two years after Halo: Combat Evolved had launched with the Xbox. There was pressure from some at Microsoft to hit this date, both so they’d be able to turn around and spend the same 2-year development cycle on Halo 3 so it could launch alongside the next Xbox console that was already pegged for holiday 2005, and to give people who signed up for a year-long subscription to Xbox Live at its launch in fall 2002 a reason to renew. Some Xbox executives, feeling the heat of the rival Playstation 2 and GameCube consoles, wanted Bungie to show something at E3 2002 in late May. Again, the studio and Ed Fries pushed back[1]. But Microsoft wouldn’t have to wait long before Bungie was ready.

X02 New York

In late June, Bungie decided to put together a short, in-engine trailer for Microsoft’s North American X02 event that was to be held in New York that August. Originally it was envisioned to be just a 30 second to 1-minute long glimpse. Instead of creating something just for a trailer, they decided to show a part of a cutscene from the beginning of the game set between when the Master Chief had repelled a Covenant boarding party from an Earth-orbiting gun platform and when he leaped out an airlock to attack an enemy ship from within. As he walked to the airlock, and while hearing calls for help from humans on the ground, Spartan 117 would grab a gun, look through a window at Earth being attacked and smash his fist against the glass in anger. Joe Staten wanted to end it with the jump into space to board the Covenant ship, but planned conservatively, not knowing how much the team could deliver so early in the life of the engine and project as a whole. When art assets came in more quickly than expected, the space jump was added in.

The scene would be accompanied by new music from composing duo Martin O’Donnell and Michael Salvatori. They worked until the last minute on the sounds and music for the trailer, along with audio lead Jay Weinland. While voice lines were recorded about three weeks before the debut, the music was recorded on August 2nd, just days before the public premiere of the trailer on the 8th. Weinland even played English horn and oboe on the track. The recording was done with a 32 piece orchestra and a 16 person choir, with the latter including O’Donnell and being conducted by his wife Marcie.

Microsoft’s X02 event in New York was a chance for the company to show off the holiday lineup for the Xbox, including Xbox Live, and tease things coming out in the future. They announced a sequel to racing game Project Gotham, a partnership with Bioware that would eventually result in Jade Empire, talked up Splinter Cell, Shenmue II, and Panzer Dragoon Orta, and let the press get hands-on time with Brute Force and Blinx: The Time Sweeper. But all of those games were overshadowed by Halo 2. The trailer was stunning, showcasing advanced graphics, beautiful music, and the promise of defending Earth from a Covenant assault. At the same time the show was going on in New York, Bungie posted a news item to their website announcing the game and including several high-resolution renders from the trailer. But they didn’t include the trailer itself. That wouldn’t be released to the public for another month. Until then, Halo fans had to make do with a handful of screenshots and the breathless descriptions from the press who attended the event. Microsoft gave the game a release window of holiday 2003, a wait that seemed interminable to many.

While Bungie and Microsoft exuded confidence and ambition about the game publically, it was coming along slowly. The game wasn’t due for over a year, so there was no cause for panic yet. The studio didn’t have much actually built aside from the trailer. There were bits and pieces here and there, but the engine was still being written which often meant it kept the art and design teams from being able to see how their work looked in-game. There were just a handful of test areas that allowed designers to prototype ideas. One had low gravity, with the player being able to jump much higher than usual to reach a door. Firing their weapon downward would even slow their descent. Another had Covenant patrolling in the dark with flashlights. A third had a mass of humans being dropped off by a “shield ship” just outside a Covenant bunker after which both sides would fight. Designs for the Prophet and Brute were finalized, as was the addition of two new weapons, the SMG and Battle Rifle, and the outline of the story was in place[2].

As 2002 wound down and 2003 began to spin up, there were two big changes at the studio. First, Alex Seropian, who co-founded the company with Jason Jones, left at the end of August. His role and duties had changed after the sale to Microsoft and weren’t quite what he wanted. Everyone at the studio had trusted him and he’d been able to keep everything moving smoothly. Second, Jones himself shifted his focus to the Phoenix team and brought several designers with him. Even with this infusion of new blood, Phoenix struggled. A playable build was made, but company leadership couldn’t see a way to turn it into a full game. The project, which had been in development since the company was based in Chicago, before they had been bought by Microsoft, was canceled. Jones didn’t want to disband the team and instead let them start on a new game, codenamed Gypsum. Halo 2 was already dealing with the problems of distributed leadership and now had to deal with the loss of one founder, a decrease in attention from the other, and a loss of design talent.

Work on the multiplayer suite continued apace. Very little had been done for the big Warfare mode, but by January 2003 designs had been fleshed out for many of the “party game” maps and the team was starting to move on to roughing them out in pre-visualization. The single-player campaign and engine were moving along much more slowly. That’s why, in early March, Bungie announced that the game would not come out until 2004. To ease the sting, the announcement also carried news that the game would make an appearance at E3 2003. Showing how big the video game industry had become, the news of the release window push was covered by mainstream outlets like the BBC.

The Demo That Will Live In Infamy

A lot of work goes into making E3 demos look effortless. A lot of work. Bungie began planning a demo for E3 2003 in February of that year and hoped that it would kick development into overdrive. They quickly settled on showcasing a chunk of gameplay from the level “Earth City,” which would become the “Outskirts”/”Metropolis” level pair in the final game. It was already in production, featured a lot of things they wanted to show, and since it came from soon after the cutscene in the X02 trailer it wouldn’t spoil much.

The gameplay and features they wanted to show made for an ambitious demo. They also wanted to avoid making something just for the demo. This was going to be an actual level and show as many things actually working in the engine, without cheating, as possible. At first, the audio team was unsure if the engine would support everything they wanted to do sound-wise in time so they thought about playing music from a separate source, a technique they’d used for the original game’s showing at Gamestock 01. By April, a month before the conference, the studio had a rough version of the demo playable, just in time for some visiting editors from Official Xbox Magazine. Hours had already gotten long at Bungie. The OXM guys didn’t finish up until 10 PM and they saw very few people leave. Around the same time, a film crew recorded footage at the studio for a Discovery Channel special on the Xbox titled “The X-Factor: Inside Microsoft’s Xbox.” A segment of the show would be dedicated to the making of Halo 2.

Since the X02 trailer and the related media burst, Bungie had been publically silent about Halo 2. The E3 demo was their reemergence and they were planning big. They cut little from their initial vision for the demo. While the developers hadn’t budged much from their plans, that didn’t make the plans any easier to implement. Vehicle hijacking, a standout feature, didn’t work in the engine and essentially wouldn’t until after the convention. The demo would utilize a hack where the player would be warped into the animation without having to press a button. It was one of many compromises made to get the demo ready. The engine itself, a continuation of the “pstencil” test, struggled to perform, a consequence of the taxing new lighting system. Even with much of the geometry in Earth City being pared down to a minimum number of polygons, it chugged along at poor framerates that sometimes numbered in the single digits up to just a week or so before E3. But the studio was able to pull it out of the fire and get it running acceptably by the time the away team left for Los Angeles.

Microsoft knew they had a hot property on their hands and treated it accordingly. They scheduled a playthrough of the demo for the very end of their pre-show briefing, the prime spot, and let the attending members of the press know. What the members of the press didn’t know was that the Halo 2 demo had crashed in the very last rehearsal[1]. The development console housing the demo had been placed near a large speaker, whose magnet apparently corrupted the files on the dev kit. Some quick copying from another kit saved the day and during the big moment, with Joe Staten playing it live for the assembled press, it went off without a hitch.

For any convention-goers who didn’t make the briefing or any who wanted to watch the demo again, Microsoft constructed a bespoke theater on the show floor with HD screens and surround sound. Every 15 minutes during show hours, and sometimes outside of show hours, a Bungie employee ran through the demo for a small gaggle of spectators. Before the convention officially opened some people from Rare LTD, recently acquired by Microsoft, stopped by the theater to see the demo, and Bungie showed it off at the after-hours FanFest they scheduled for the event.

The demo was a sensation. There were whoops and hollers during the pre-show briefing and slacked-jaws in the specially built theater. Again, like the X02 trailer, it was not initially released to the public. But this time, thanks to a large number of playthroughs in the demo theater, people at the convention had a chance to surreptitiously record it. Bootleg, off-screen captures quickly hit the internet. The gameplay and graphics on offer were so good that some members of the press doubted that they were real. At the very end of the convention, a group of editors from various publications gathered in the theater to watch as a Bungie employee played through the demo yet again, this time changing it up and taking suggestions to prove it was real gameplay so the game could be eligible for E3 awards.

We came back from E3 with a demo. We did not come back from E3 with a playable part of a level. — Joe Staten

The Reckoning

Bungie had been hoping to use the E3 demo as a catalyst for the rest of the project. It had been a huge success publically, but behind the scenes, things were subdued. Even before the away team returned from E3 in Los Angeles, people at the studio had started becoming anxious about the fate of the game. The engine they were developing was not going to be able to adequately run the levels the designers were creating, especially not on retail hardware. It barely ran on the development kits the team used and those had twice the RAM as the consoles people had at home. What they already had wasn’t as fun as they’d wanted it to be either. If they still wanted to release the game in 2004, they were going to have to make some major changes. The team had been crunching for E3 but their load was not going to get any easier. The game was going to get a significant redesign.

Company founder and project lead Jason Jones held meetings with the team to break the news. The campaign would have to be rethought, losing several entire levels and altering others. There were no resources for the big Warfare multiplayer mode so it would be tossed. Very little work had been done on it anyway. It existed as little more than a single design document and a handful of references in the code. And the engine would have to be rewritten to use less intensive, and less attractive, lighting and shadows. Gameplay designers already had to deal with a year of development without being able to play the game they were designing. Now they’d have to suffer through almost another one. They only had the resources for either dual-wielding or melee combos, but not both. Dual-wielding won out[4]. The multiplayer “party game” was the only part of the game to escape major revisions. But it would require some large scale maps now that the big Warfare mode had been cut.

Gypsum was canceled. A third-person action game where the player took control of a Minotaur, it had come along quickly. A playable build was created that even included music and sound effects from Martin O’Donnell. But everybody was needed for Halo 2 so the whole team was moved onto the sequel.

Joe Staten, Jason Jones, and others huddled in a conference room and spent the summer rewriting the story and rebuilding the campaign. They put all their ideas up on whiteboards as they needed something that could be changed at a moment’s notice. There had been little work done on a level called “Forerunner Tank” so it was cut, with its main hook, a giant piece of moving geometry, being added to another level. The end of the announcement trailer had teased a level with Master Chief boarding a Covenant cruiser. Codenamed, appropriately, “Covenant Ship,” the level would have seen the player team up with new character Commander Miranda Keyes, daughter of the first game’s Captain Jacob Keyes, and her contingent of ODST soldiers. Eventually, the player would hop in a Covenant Wraith tank and shell the ship’s core to destroy it. It, too, was cut. Most painfully, the higher-ups eventually came to the conclusion that the ending to the game had to be cut. While a strike team of Bungie veterans was hammering away at the story, others in the studio were still working on the game, some still on things that would end up cut.

While all this was going on at the studio, the public was oblivious. Bungie did nothing to betray how much trouble they were having. In September, Microsoft put on its annual X show, this time in Nice, France. Bungie sent two new screenshots and a 7-minute long mini-documentary about the development of the game. The video included a handful of seconds of new game footage and nothing about development troubles. As if pulling Halo 2 out of the fire wasn’t hard enough, in October Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer erroneously claimed that Bungie was also working on Halo 3.

Marty O’Donnell took Nile Rodgers up on his offer to recruit rock stars for the music and got in touch with legendary guitarist Seve Vai, who hit the recording studio in October. Another famous guitarist would also lend his talents to the soundtrack, though he did so without the knowledge of his agent or label. He just wanted to be able to tell his friends that he played guitar for the game and didn’t want to go through the legal rigamarole to get his name in the credits. So John Mayer’s name does not appear anywhere in the credits, though he plays on two pieces. These two would be joined on the soundtrack by rock bands Incubus, Breaking Benjamin, and Hoobastank. They created songs inspired by the game for inclusion on volume 1 of the soundtrack, with some sending O’Donnell instrumental versions that he could choose to use in the game if he wanted. Not everybody at the studio was thrilled about including current music, but Marty enjoyed enough of it to include some pieces in the game itself.

Bungie had not announced any specific release date beyond “2004” and still publically harbored some hopes of getting the game out in the middle of the year. Xbox head of first-party games Ed Fries had been a great ally to the studio, being instrumental to their purchase in 2000 and giving them great latitude since. He’d also helped give them cover when other Xbox executives grew frustrated with the development of Halo 2. He’d gotten tired of fighting with his bosses over what was best for the studios under him and decided to leave Microsoft in November of 2003, though it wouldn’t be effective until January[1].

In response to the popularity of Halo: Combat Evolved’s multiplayer, Bungie sought to make Halo 2 on Xbox Live feel like you were sitting right next to your friends while playing. They referred to this as a “virtual couch.” You could join up with your friends in a “party” and skip around the different multiplayer “playlists.” These playlists took the place of a server browser, ubiquitous at the time in other first-person shooters. Instead, in Halo 2, you’d enter “matchmaking” in a specific playlist and the game would choose a map and rules, and pair you up with people of roughly your skill. This way Bungie could largely control the experience for players and make sure the vast majority of them had a fun time. They’d even worked with the Live team to make sure the service would support what they wanted to do, playing a roll in the Tsunami update for Xbox Live that rolled out around E3.

This wasn’t without its struggles. At the end of 2003 and beginning of 2004, Bungie struggled to get the Xbox Live team to understand parties. So UI lead Dave Candland created a prototype to demonstrate how it would work. It showed a group partying up, sending invites, and even swapping in-game films, a feature that would end up on the cutting room floor. The prototype eased a lot of troubles Bungie had had getting people to understand parties. Multiplayer Lead Max Hoberman followed it up with an FAQ in January 2004.

This strategy was a big swing. Some players were not going to like matchmaking taking the place of a server browser. They were used to being able to choose the exact match they wanted to join. In Halo 2, that match would be given to them, and Bungie would dictate the rules. Microsoft’s user research people warned the studio against this. They’d asked gamers if they understood the concept and if they liked it. While most subjects understood Bungie’s design, many didn’t like it. Even some people at Bungie weren’t fans, but the multiplayer team pushed on, confident in their vision. They’d also determined that if Halo 2 had as many players as they were expecting, a server browser might become essentially useless. Servers would fill up so fast that the browser would be chronically out-of-date.

Death March

In January, Frank O’Connor joined the company from Official Xbox Magazine and got to work emulating what the studio had done for Halo: Combat Evolved by offering the community weekly updates on the development process. One of his first included a new screenshot from the game, the first from multiplayer. At the time, the engine and tools made taking screenshots, at least of the multiplayer portion, very difficult. Hitting the button to take a screenshot would essentially crash everybody’s game.

While the campaign was a mess, the multiplayer was coming along fairly well, or at least the “party game” was. In January Bungie decided that it was far enough along to test out over Xbox Live. A very lucky 1,000 Microsoft employees from all over the United States would be chosen for this alpha test. They’d each receive a disc in the mail and have 5 weeks where they could play an early version of Halo 2 multiplayer on 3 different maps: Waterworks, Burial Mounds, and Lockout. The test didn’t have everything; several weapons and vehicles were missing, the HUD was from Halo: Combat Evolved, and dual-wielding was not available. It was meant more as a test of the networking code than of the gameplay. Even so, it was a big hit.

In February, some recording was done with the lead voice actors. They were based in several different locations which added difficulty for Marty, Joe, and Jay Weinland, the audio lead. They finished by the middle of March and began to integrate the voices into the game immediately. With the popularity and acclaim of the first game, Bungie had access to higher-profile names for voice acting. Some of the talent added was Ron Perlman as human Admiral Lord Hood, Keith David as the Dervish, and Michelle Rodriguez, Laura Prepon, and David Cross as Marines.

E3 loomed in May yet again, and Bungie wanted to show something. But the single-player campaign was still in no shape to be shown and producers didn’t want the team to spend any time preparing for the show when that time could be better used to actually finish the game. So about six weeks before the show Max Hoberman, in charge of the multiplayer, was approached and asked to put something together for it. He and level designer Chris Carney quickly whipped up a new map to show off the new 1 sided game types they had been working on. They called the new map Zanzibar, modeling it off the early Earth levels in the campaign. The paper design was finished in little more than a day and a rough in-game version quickly after that. The map’s big feature would be a giant, rotating fan splitting the area between a beach where the attackers would spawn and a base the defenders would protect. The fan was the first dynamic element added to any multiplayer map.

On May 11th, Microsoft put on their pre-E3 press briefing and just like the year before they had an 8-minute Halo 2 demo, this time of multiplayer. Max Hoberman and Joe Staten came on stage and demonstrated gameplay mechanics while showing off the new map. Joe, ever the writer, even managed to use the intro to sneak in some lore. When they finished, Xbox executive Peter Moore came back on the stage and announced the long-anticipated release date: November 9th. In order to show how serious Microsoft and Bungie were about that date, he’d even had it tattooed on his arm. And he made sure to clarify that, yes, that was 2004. Bungie took the opportunity to announce a limited collector’s edition of the game that would come with a metal case and a DVD filled with behind the scenes videos. They had several Xboxes set up for the press to get a taste of five on five 1-Flag CTF on Zanzibar. They also gave a private house in Beverly Hills a glitzy makeover and a similar setup and invited press and celebrities like Lindsay Lohan, Breckin Meyer, and Tara Reid to get their hands on the game.

The studio didn’t have any time to catch its breath after E3. They had a packed schedule through the end of September. The first big date on that schedule was hitting “code complete” in June. This meant that all the code that was needed for the game to run needed to be completed by then. The only code allowed to be added after that day would be to fix bugs. There was geometry for everything in the game by the first week of the month. A rating from the ESRB came the next week, M for Mature just like the first game. And the first print ad hit newsstands soon after that, though still with a rating pending due to print’s long lead times. Many of the animators spent the month finishing in-game animation and moving to cinematics, with help from two loaned animators to ease the burden.

Bungie also decided to run another multiplayer test with players from outside the studio, again using Microsoft employees, though significantly more than the alpha: 8,000 this time, roughly 14% of the entire company. Just like that test, people in this beta test would get a disc in the mail that would play on their stock, retail Xbox over normal Xbox Live. This beta version was closer to the final game and it was meant as more of a gameplay and Xbox Live features test than the alpha. It had a mostly final HUD, dual wielding, and more weapons and vehicles. It would even test updating, with a map being added partway through the test. But befitting the crazy development schedule, it also managed to have several things that did not end up in the final game. There was a (non-functional) menu option for Saved Films, references to Warfare and Headhunter game modes, and inaccessible data for the Mongoose ATV, a flying vehicle called the Falcon, a flamethrower, and a weapon called the “disintegrator.” Gameplay wasn’t safe from changes either as the Battle Rifle was still single-shot when zoomed in, matching the E3 version. Switching to a three-shot burst when zoomed, to match the un-zoomed behavior, would come during the final stretch of development.

The crunch continued into July. The month started off with the dialogue being turned over to localization. Hands-on testing began with outside players brought in to play the game and give their feedback. Bungie was ahead of the curve in this area and credited this user testing with making the first game so approachable. The beta was set to be manufactured, which it eventually was, though not without issue. The full 8,000 discs were accidentally made before any were tested, but it turned out there was a problem with a file not being digitally signed correctly. So 8,000 new discs had to be printed with fixed files. The game hit “content complete” late in the month, i.e. every piece of content in the game, geometry, sounds, weapons, vehicles, enemies, etc., needed to be in the game, with only fixes allowed in after the deadline. The month ended with a build of the game being taken over to London and Europe so the game could get rated there and some press visiting the studio to get hands-on time with multiplayer for articles that would be released in September.

Also in July, Microsoft and Bungie unleashed a bold marketing plan. A trailer was created for the game, using high resolution renders of the E3 2003 demo, multiplayer footage on Zanzibar, and new CG elements. This trailer was sent to theaters and shown before several summer blockbusters. This was unprecedented for a video game, but the creativity of the marketing department didn’t end there. The trailer held an easter egg. At the very end, for just a handful of frames, the “xbox.com” website text briefly changed to “ilovebees.com.” This was the start of one of the very first alternate reality games. People who visited the I Love Bees site would initially see a fairly boring looking page for a beekeeper. But then the site would become “corrupted” and cryptic information pertaining to a Halo AI stuck in the present would appear on the screen, with players, or “beekeepers” as they called themselves, able to unlock more information about it by working together. Bungie had been too busy to collaborate much on the story, so it didn’t tie into Halo 2 that well and also felt quite different from most Halo storytelling. As such, the studio didn’t consider it part of the Halo canon. This game would go on all summer, ensnaring thousands of people to try to figure out what was going on and even venture to payphones to get story snippets. One player even ventured into a hurricane to answer a payphone, causing the person on the other end to break character and urge them to get to safety. The game would culminate with lucky players getting the chance to play Halo 2 multiplayer at a handful of movie theaters around the US before the game’s release.

As if the hectic schedule for the last couple of months of development wasn’t bad enough, Microsoft’s Geopolitical Strategy team chimed in late to say that the studio had to change the name of the Covenant playable character. “Dervish” was no longer acceptable. The Microsoft team was nervous about the enemy faction in the game being represented by a character with an Islamic inspired name. They wanted to stay away from anything that resembled “America vs. Islam.” Cutting the ending of the game, where the Master Chief and the Dervish teamed up, didn’t help. Bungie was upset, believing they’d already gotten the “okay” on the name, but they had no choice except to rush to change it to something new, in this case, “Arbiter.” The cinematics and sound teams scrambled to rerecord lines of dialogue and change subtitles.

Bungie began taking the E3 build on the road in August for more people to play. It popped up at GamesCom in Leipzig and X04 Canada in Toronto. It would pop up a couple of more times before the full game released. Crunch got even more brutal as the release loomed, with some Bungie employees essentially sleeping at the office until the game was finished. 100 hour work weeks became common. Recording with voice actors finished up and the game was finally in a complete enough state for composers Martin O’Donnell and Michael Salvatori to begin writing music for it. It started to get put into the game before the month ended. The beta test ended late in the month. The end of the month also saw, in a way, the first Halo 2 tournament. Frank O’Connor and Brian Jarrard from Bungie brought a couple of consoles with the E3 build to a Major League Gaming tournament in Seattle and let the pros try it out. A week later O’Connor brought the same build to the Penny Arcade Expo.

September would be the last month of production, as the game was going to be sent to manufacturing in October come hell or high water. A full month was needed to print and distribute millions of copies of the game. The first week of the month saw the first component to be completed: the game’s manual. Martin O’Donnell and Micheal Salvatori had mostly completed the score, but some pieces still needed to be recorded and added to the game. The game audio, like everything else besides the manual, was coming in hot with new sounds being added nearly daily. Editing finished up on the documentary videos for the DVD that came with the Limited Collector’s Edition of the game. The middle of the month saw the game hit a fun milestone: every level, cinematic, and encounter was in the game and all the music had been composed. As the month began to end, many in the studio had essentially finished their main work on the game and were now helping test it. The cinematics, audio, and engineering teams were the last to complete their work. The E3 build was again pulled out, this time for the Tokyo Game Show, with Frank O’Connor again doing the honors. He’d head from Japan to Korea to get the game rated there. At the very end of the month, Bungie finished their work on the game and sent it off for certification.

The final hours saw plenty of activity. Skulls, a set of easter eggs that allowed the player to modify the behavior of the campaign, were put in “after the last minute” according to Jason Jones. Joe Staten added some facial animation in the last 24 hours, late enough that there are seeming “final” clips in the “making of” documentary without it. And then there were the “Flood sea monkeys.” These were small Flood spores in a tank at the beginning of the level The Oracle. Environment artists Dave Dunn, Vic Deleon, and Chris Barrett, slap-happy at this stage, spent the last couple hours of development tweaking their animations. They made their last change only to find that they’d broken the sea monkeys who were now floating outside their tank. They had to beg Head of Test Harold Ryan, who controlled access to the source code, to let them check in a fix, all while Dave chanted “Vic broke the sea monkeys, Vic broke the sea monkeys!”

With the game sent off to manufacturing, most of Bungie took some well deserved time off. Many had been working horrible hours for months on end. Tools programmer Mat Noguchi had spent the last three months working 14–16 hours a day, 7 days a week. Designer Paul Bertone hadn’t slept in his own bed for the last month. His fellow designer Jaime Griesemer estimated that he worked 14 hour days, 7 days a week, for over a year. Bodies were broken and relationships were fractured. It was awful for just about everyone who worked at the studio. Co-founder and project lead Jason Jones felt responsible for the difficult schedule and had suffered along with everyone else. He would go on a lengthy sabbatical after the game shipped, playing a much smaller role in Halo 3.

While they’d finished the game, the developers had little to no time to polish it. Skulls were in the game, but there was no ability to “unlock” them. Every time a player wanted to use one of the skulls, they’d have to go pick it up again. The cutscenes had noticeable texture pop-in. And just like the first Halo, weapon balance for the campaign had unintentionally changed the multiplayer. Bungie scrambled to put together a patch that could fix the multiplayer balance in an era before patching on consoles was routine. The bungie.net team also got to work on creating the online stats features. The game had come in so hot that the online team had been roped into helping out. As such, very little work had been done on stats until the game was finished. Almost the entirety of the groundbreaking Halo 2 bungie.net stats implementation was done between when the game went to manufacturing and the actual release.

The game would “go gold,” i.e. would be certified and sent to manufacturing, in the middle of October. To celebrate, Bungie uploaded a tour through their, at this point mostly empty, studio space. Just days later, a French PAL version of the game leaked. Spoilers would immediately start spreading through the internet, but since this was before ubiquitous social media, they spread much more slowly. That same week, some members of the media went to San Fransisco to play the game for reviews. A similar event would be held in New York the following week. TV commercials starting hitting the air the last week of the month and included the first footage of the campaign that the public had seen in over a year.

Release

Microsoft made sure to make the release itself the video game event of the year. They created a celebrity “Halo 2 Council” of a small number of hand-picked, Halo crazy celebrities who would not only get the game early but also get a specialized case that looked like a Pelican troop transport and included a 15" HDTV. There were the I Love Bees events on November 4th where players could get time with the multiplayer before the release. In addition, there was a contest for 50 lucky people to fly to Microsoft to play the game early. A special on the making of the game aired on MTV the week before the release. The official US launch party was held in Times Square in New York City and there were also official events in London, Toronto, Seoul, and Sydney. Bungie themselves would host a LAN party in Seattle the night of the release before having a private event for themselves. Microsoft claimed that 6,500 stores would open at midnight to sell the game.

Bungie and Microsoft were rewarded with record-setting sales. There had been over a million and a half preorders and almost a million more people bought it on the first day alone for 2.4 million copies sold in the first 24 hours. Microsoft declared Halo 2 the “most successful entertainment launch in history” and boasted that it made more money than the most successful movie launch ever. Halo 2 had brought in $125 million the first day, eclipsing the first-weekend box office total of any movie up to that point. By the end of its first month on sale, it had doubled that, totaling $250 million. The game also gave a big boost to Xbox Live, which saw subscriptions jump to 2 million. Halo 2 would be the most popular game on the service for 2 years, not being unseated until the release of Gears of War in 2006. The sequel’s financial performance was so good, that the yearly quarter of its release was the first profitable one in the history of the Xbox division [1].

The game was also a huge success with critics. Praise and high scores abounded. Some publications gave it an even higher score than they had to Halo: Combat Evolved. Critics praised the multiplayer and were happy that it mostly avoided the repetition of campaign spaces that plagued the original. Gamespot called the game “absolutely superb,” IGN said it was everything could have hoped for and more, and Game Informer dubbed it “the greatest first-person shooter the console world has seen to date.” Critics had to tiptoe around the Arbiter, as Bungie/Microsoft had barred them from talking about him before the game released. They’d done a great job keeping him a secret during development.

Another thing that reviewers had to decide how to handle was the cliffhanger ending. Some outlets decided to call it out specifically, while others just alluded to it. Nobody was aware at this point that Bungie had meant for the game to have an actual ending on Earth. The documentary on the Limited Collector’s Edition gave viewers a peek at the trouble behind the scenes but shied away from stating that the ending had been cut. Bungie had intended for the game to end with the Master Chief and the Arbiter teaming up on Earth to chase down the Prophet of Truth as he made his way to the Ark, which was located on the planet. A decent amount of work had been done on the level(s) that made up the ending. There was geometry created, dialogue recorded, and even some encounter design done. It would have included multiple Scarabs chasing the heroes as they made their way towards Truth.

Other levels and pieces of levels had been cut in the crunch. A level called Alpha Moon, that was meant to take place on a moon strewn with the wreckage of the first halo, was cut with some of its geometry being used for the level Quarantine Zone. The multiplayer level Burial Mounds actually takes place on the “alpha moon.” Bungie toyed with having some of the tunnels in Metropolis filled with water but didn’t have enough time to get it working. High Charity, the last Master Chief level, was supposed to end with Spartan 117 hopping in a Warthog and racing to board the Forerunner ship before it took off. This lasted long enough that some of the geometry for the run was left on the disc.

Aftermath

Some at Bungie were surprised at the response to the game. They were aware of what the game could have been and knew all the ways the released game fell short of that. Programmer Chris Butcher said he found it difficult to play the game as all he could see were the places it fell short. But the public was ignorant of all the trashed plans and cut features. They just knew the ambitious campaign, addictive multiplayer, and revolutionary online features. That wasn’t a surprise to others at the studio. Designer Jamie Griesemer had been involved in playtesting and had the research to prove that people loved the game.

The crunch to finish the first Halo had been bad. The crunch to finish Halo 2 had been much worse. Bungie vowed to never go through that again. For Halo 3, they made significant changes. They brought on more producers and were more proactive about cutting things. While the production still wasn’t perfect, it was far better than for Halo 2. Bungie took the first step towards this better production with the DLC maps for Halo 2.

The directive for those maps was that the team making them had to have fun, much to the annoyance of multiplayer lead Max Hoberman. Nine maps would be released in bunches in 2005. They were available to download through Xbox Live and were also made available through the Halo 2 Multiplayer Map Pack, an Xbox disc that contained the 9 maps, a new short film made in the Halo 2 engine, a documentary on the making of the maps, and several other videos. Due to a sponsorship deal with Mountain Dew, two maps were available for free and the other 7 were eventually made free. Two more maps would be released in 2007, both remakes of maps from Halo: Combat Evolved. Due to the release of the Halo 3 beta, their release date was moved up so as to not interfere. This led to an original map and a remake of Halo PC map Timberland being cut.

Even after the release of several sequels and spinoffs, Halo 2’s legacy is evident. Microsoft used a PC port in 2007 to push Windows Vista and Games for Windows Live. The online matchmaking that the game popularized quickly took over nearly every online game and is considered the standard today. The game did away with the health pack of the first game and instead just had a recharging shield system, a mechanic that has also become a standard in first-person shooters since. The first FPS Halo spinoff, Halo 3: ODST, was based in the moments after a major event from Halo 2. When Xbox Live for the original Xbox was taken offline in April 2010, a huge amount of the focus was on Halo 2. Some players even refused to let it go quietly and kept their Xboxes on, with Halo 2 running online, for weeks after the official cut off. For its 10th birthday, it got a full graphical overhaul as the centerpiece of the Master Chief Collection, a package containing all 4 of the games that starred the Master Chief at the time. Several multiplayer maps from the game will still be mentioned in conversations about the greatest of all time. And the Halo campaigns are still feeling the effects of the decision to introduce the Arbiter. Halo 5: Guardians, the latest game in the franchise as of this writing, took the player to the Elite homeworld to aid the Arbiter in his quest to quell an insurrection.

In-Depth: Multiplayer

Party Game

The “party game” multiplayer team essentially started out as just Max Hoberman, and that was several months after pre-production on Halo 2 started. He was able to get artist Chris Carney to help him out and eventually a couple of others. They came up with a design philosophy for maps: each map needed to be designed for a primary and secondary game type. And one of the two had to be Slayer since it was the most popular game type. Each map was also designed to fit within the campaign settings. Four of the first maps designed were Lockout, Midship, Ascension, and Ivory Tower. The first three kept their original names while the last was originally called Cyclotron. Midship was designed for people who weren’t going to go online. It was made for 2v2 Capture the Flag and had its design locked almost two years before the game shipped. This desire for small, offline groups to have fun options is also what inspired 1-flag CTF and asymmetrical maps.

Warfare was going to be the game mode for large scale encounters, so the “party game” multiplayer team mostly focused on smaller maps until Warfare was cut. Once that mode was dropped, the multiplayer team had to start making larger maps. Zanzibar and Headlong were part of this push, with the latter being one of the last maps designed. A remake of Sidewinder from the first game was discussed, but Hoberman wasn’t a fan of the map.

Map Design: Headlong

The multiplayer map Headlong was the last map to be designed and actually make it into the game. Here’s the initial design document:

A rough version was made and playtests were held on it to further hone the design.

Multiplayer lead Max Hoberman was never entirely happy with the map. Since it was the last map designed, it didn’t have as much iteration as the other maps. He felt it violated one of the rules he and the rest of the multiplayer team had come up with. They felt that at the very beginning of a match, each team should start moving in a straight line, together. That wasn’t always the case on this map. Zanzibar had been the first map with a dynamic element (the gate) and Headlong was designed with them in mind from the start, though it ended up only having the seesaw beam.

Map Design: Lockout

This map was a creation of Lead Multiplayer Environment Artist Chris Carney. Here’s how he described his thoughts for it:

Initially I was trying to accomplish several things. First, I wanted to build a small 4–8 player space that had isolated combat spaces (rooms) that were connected by bridges. This way the player could see where the opposition was moving, but not know exactly where they ended up. Second, I liked the idea of a map hanging exposed over an abyss, so that players who moved well through the space would be rewarded. Specifically, the space needed to be easy to run through, but also contain “bonus” exposed ledges and jumps that would provide shortcuts for the more adventurous. Finally, I wanted the map to have different combat experiences on each floor. The lowest floor would emphasize close range combat, the middle level room to room clearing utilizing the bridges, and the top level would feature tower to tower mid-range donging.

The map was also designed for 1v1 matches for people on the same machine.

Carney did a lot of work on this map in 3D instead of 2D, a departure from many of the other maps:

Multiplayer lead Max Hoberman suggested a tweak to give more playable space to the structure on the left, so Carney adjusted it accordingly.

The mockup was even given some assets and textures to give people a better feel for what the map would look like.

As one of the first maps designed and built, it was selected to be part of the private multiplayer alpha that took place in early 2004. By this point, it was very close to its final look, though tweaks would still happen before the game launched.

Map Design: Midship

At the beginning of pre-production on Halo 2, multiplayer lead Max Hoberman tried to design the smallest multiplayer map possible. He called his attempt Cyclone.

He decided it wouldn’t work and scrapped it, but still wanted to make a very small map for people on one Xbox. He called his next attempt Midship.

He revised the design a little while later:

A design document was then created, with the layout revised again.

The design would be slightly tweaked after this, but by late 2002/early 2003, it was essentially done.

Warfare

Bungie had discussed an ambitious multiplayer mode for the first game. Some light prototyping of the mode had even been done when the company was still in Chicago and independent. At the beginning of development for Halo 2, it was thought that this mode would be the entirety of the game’s multiplayer.

The original plans for Halo’s multiplayer had been to do something very novel, something akin to Halo 5’s Warzone, with larger maps, more players and AI. And when the team started on Halo 2, they wanted to revive that, but completely scrap the smaller arena-based multiplayer mode of the original, and local split-screen. All the stuff that had been such a huge hit in Halo was just being thrown out the window. — Max Hoberman

The unforeseen popularity of the first game’s multiplayer suite got them to reconsider and add it alongside the new Warfare mode. It was planned to be an asymmetrical, round-based, objective game with 32 players. While work on virtually every other part of the game continued in some fashion, little was done for Warfare. This didn’t stop Bungie from teasing it, however. The initial press release announcing the game gave a brief description:

“We still have the multiplayer game-types that people loved in ‘Halo’, but we’re planning something special for multiplayer in ‘Halo 2,’” hinted Jaime Griesemer, “Halo 2's” lead designer. “I don’t want to ruin the surprise, but imagine the essential ‘Halo’ single-player experience: pitched battles between the humans and the Covenant, massive vehicle and infantry engagements. Now imagine that every combatant is an actual person playing over Xbox Live!”

The EDGE Magazine cover story for their September 2002 issue talked about it a little more[4].

“The main focus of our multiplayer efforts on Halo 2 is the squad-oriented, two-team online game. It will feature Human Spartans against Covenant Elites and will attempt to capture the oneplayer Halo experience in an online setting. Instead of the gametypes of Halo, the online game will be a real battle with real objectives, supporting events such as airstrikes, and lots of carnage.”

A similar thing was said in the cover story for Electronic Gaming Monthly’s November 2002 issue[2]:

“The thing we’re excited about bringing to Xbox Live is recreating Halo’s singleplayer experience — with all the weapons, vehicles, and explosions — among a bunch of players on the Internet.”

A description for the gametype is in the private multiplayer alpha and beta, but the gametype itself is not playable and there doesn’t appear to be any code beyond the description.

Pit Humans against Elites in an epic battle that will shape the outcome of the Covenant war. You have but one life to give for your homeworld.

In-Depth: Original Ending

“We have the whole climax of the game planned out on Earth and we’re not doing it. And that sucks.” — Jason Jones

Possibly the most painful cut that Halo 2 received is the scrapping of the finale. While at first Bungie claimed the cliffhanger ending was on purpose, it didn’t take long for them to admit that an intended ending had been a casualty of the brutal development. The original plan was for the Master Chief and the Dervish/Arbiter to team up and pursue the Prophet of Truth as he made his way to the Ark, which was situated on Earth.

We had this great third act wrap-up of Master Chief and the Arbiter coming together and defeating the Prophets and discovering The Ark, and this deeper secret inside of it. But it was so above what we could possibly do from a production point of view that it fell apart. There was meant to be a mission where you were fighting on top of The Ark, like it was uncovered like it is in Halo 3. So you’re fighting multiple Scarabs, going through a trench run to make your way into it. We had it all modeled out, we had it all massed out, this big structure with Scarabs sitting on top of it. — Joe Staten

It’s possible that the idea of the ending battle featuring multiple Scarabs was transplanted to the final game. At one point, the level Great Journey, the final on in the shipping game, was supposed to have the player riding on the Scarab that Sergeant Johnson is driving while it attacks two other Scarabs. The performance was terrible so the other two Scarabs were cut.

The Ark, at this point, resembled the portal as seen in Halo 3. The level (or levels; some plans for the game only listed 9 levels, but several would be split into multiple ones like Earth City becoming Outskirts and Metropolis) lasted long enough to have dialogue recorded for it and to have some work done on the whiteboards that were used during the reorganization of the game. A quick shot of the whiteboard for this level can be seen in the “Designing the Levels” featurette on the DVD included with the Limited Collector's Edition.

The Ark as an idea and a design had existed during the development of the first game. Art Director Marcus Lehto had done the first design work when the company was still in Chicago, before being bought by Microsoft.

A rough version even made it into the very early prototypes for the first game.

An art book, The Art of Halo: Creating a Virtual World[5], was released day and date with the game. It features several screenshots from early development, including one that could be related to the cut ending.

The caption says it’s from an Earth level, but the surroundings are very clearly Forerunner. There are no Forerunner areas on Earth in the shipping game. The only Forerunner area known to be set on Earth in Halo 2 is the Ark.

In the Halo 2 developer commentary included with the Legendary Edition of Halo 3, Joe Staten, Jason Jones, and Martin O’Donnell briefly discuss the ending. It would have involved a medallion that the Prophet of Truth had and would not have included Cortana. The stinger at the end of the credits with her and Gravemind was always intended, even before the grand reorganizing.

Videos

Limited Collector’s Edition DVD

The following are some of the videos that were included on the DVD that came with the Limited Collector’s Edition of the game.

Other

Miscellaneous Notes

• For more (much, much more) about the Halo 2 E3 2003 demo, check out the oral history I did a couple of years ago.
• For the making of Halo: Combat Evolved, see the two-parter I wrote: part 1 and part 2.
• John Mayer’s involvement with the game would not be revealed for 10 years when composer Martin O’Donnell mentioned it during the documentary Remaking the Legend about Halo 2: Anniversary.
• A Microsoft spokeswoman estimated that the game’s budget was under $20 million.
• It’s a bit of a mystery whether the tattoo of the release date that Peter Moore sported at E3 was real. He says that it was, but normally demurs when people ask to see it, though I did find a Kotaku article from 2006 where the author says that Moore showed off the tattoo when asked. Martin O’Donnell has said that Moore walked around during the dress rehearsal with a bandage on that arm, but he doesn’t think it was real.
• The original plan for the X02 announcement trailer was more conservative and ended with the Chief smashing his fist against a window and saying something “pithy.” In the developer’s commentary, Joe Staten mentions that one of Jason Jones’ original ideas for Halo 2 was for the Chief to be on an orbital station watching the Covenant attack Earth. He’d smash his fist against a window and say “only blood will pay for this.”
• Joe Staten revealed a couple of other lines were considered for the end of the announcement trailer.
• Another early idea that Jason Jones had for the game was the Master Chief being betrayed by Miranda Keyes, who would weld a bomb to him and kick him down a hole. Joe Staten worked with him until it became the moment in the final game when the Chief meets the Gravemind.
• When the guys from Official Xbox Magazine visited Bungie in the spring of 2003 to preview the E3 showing, they played some Halo 2 multiplayer. What that entailed at that time is anyone’s guess.
• Bungie toyed with giving the SMG an optional silencer for portions of the game. The SMG would eventually get a silencer in Halo 3: ODST.
• UI Designer David Candland put together a prototype of a post-game carnage report in late 2003 that features many things that are not in the final game.
• Similarly, here’s a flowchart that Candland made to show how the UI would function. This also includes several things that didn’t make the shipping game, like saved films and an emblem editor.
• A handful of Bungie employees ventured to South Carolina in the spring of 2003 to learn about guns and military tactics from U.S. Special Forces members. Footage from this trip is in Behind The Scenes: Making of Halo 2.
• At one point during development, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer visited the studio. Engineer Charlie Gough took the opportunity to surreptitiously moon him while someone else took a picture. That picture was then used as a kind of placeholder for any missing “.ASS” file, a proprietary 3D file format at Bungie. Unfortunately, that picture ended up making it onto the shipping discs, though not in a form that any normal player would ever find. Nonetheless, the ESRB, still dealing with the aftermath of the Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas “Hot Coffee” scandal, required that the rating on the game accurately reflect the nudity that was technically in the game. So Microsoft and Bungie ended up delaying the release so they could recall it to apply a new M-Rated sticker that listed “Nudity,” which cost them an estimated $500,000.
• Bungie experimented with having ways other than active camouflage to differentiate the Arbiter from Master Chief. They tried a higher jump height, quicker attacks, and commanding Grunts, among other things [4].
• At one point the ATV had a gun on the front[4].
• Bungie also experimented with making the campaign playable online in co-operative mode but didn’t have the resources to make it work in time[4].
• The team wasn’t entirely happy with the multiplayer map Foundation which is one of the reasons it was an easter egg instead of being available from the beginning.
• Bungie toyed with the idea of manually controlled detonation for grenades. Holding down the trigger when you threw a grenade would keep it from exploding until you let go of the trigger[2].
• Both the private multiplayer alpha and private multiplayer beta have leaked and are playable on modded Xboxes.
• Ed Fries has said that Xbox executives wanted to force Bungie to ship the game before fall 2004, but several of them dispute this[1].
• The first game used hand-rolled physics simulations, but they were limited in what they could do, so Bungie switched to using the Havok physics middleware for Halo 2. It got integrated into the game before E3 2003.
• At the Game Developer’s Conference in early 2003, Jaime Griesemer, Martin O’Donnell and Mat Noguchi had a presentation on game development. During it, they showed a decent amount of art and screenshots from prototypes for Halo 2, including a couple of screenshots of a prototype for destructibility.

• Adam Levine, the lead singer of Maroon 5, sent Bungie a clip of himself singing the Halo theme, but it didn’t end up being used.
• A Flood enemy named the Juggernaut was meant for the game at one point. It made it far enough along that it’s model is on the disc. It was envisioned as a sort of battlefield control unit. There would only ever be one in a given space and if a player managed to kill it, all the Flood combat forms in the area would cease to function.

• In 2019, for the 15th anniversary of the game’s release, artist Vic Deleon posted several screenshots of a scrapped multiplayer map named Anchor Point. It was designed for 2v2 battles with all participants in Banshees and was located just under the floating platform from the Arbiter/Oracle levels. It was cut because, in Vic’s word, “it played like crap.”

Sources

These sources were used repeatedly throughout the article.

The Complete, Untold History of Halo

Better Than Halo: The Making of Halo 2

Behind The Scenes: Making of Halo 2

Halo 2 Developer’s Commentary

Bibliography

[1] Takahashi, Dean. The Xbox 360 Uncloaked. Spiderworks, 2006

[2] MacDonald, Mark, Crispin Boyer. “Halo 2.” Electronic Gaming Monthly Nov 2002: 214–238. Print

[3] “Prescreen Focus: Halo 2.” EDGE Magazine UK Sep. 2002: 46–52. Print

[4] MacDonald, Mark, Crispin Boyer, Bryan Intihar, Shane Bettenahusen. “Afterthoughts: Halo 2.” Electronic Gaming Monthly Jan. 2005: 100–102. Print

[5] Trautmann, Eric. The Art of Halo Creating A Virtual World. Random House, 2004.