Halo: Combat Evolved/Trivia

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • Breakthrough Hit: Bungie was a cult developer mainly known for the Marathon and Myth series before the release of Halo.
  • Executive Meddling: The reason for the "Combat Evolved" subtitle: Microsoft was apparently worried about the game being taken as religious or something.
  • Publisher Chosen Title: As Bungie's Jaime Griesemer explained in a retrospective Edge article, the developers didn't come up with the "Combat Evolved" part of the title:

"Microsoft marketing thought Halo was not a good name for a videogame brand. It wasn't descriptive like all the military games we were competing with. We told them Halo was the name. The compromise was they could add a subtitle. Everyone at Bungie hated it. But it turned out to be a very sticky label and has now entered the gaming lexicon… so I guess in hindsight it was a good compromise. But the real name of the game is just Halo."

  • Troubled Production: The campaign for the game, was completed in five months, due to the time scale imposed by Executive Meddling, explaining the fact that it pretty much repeats backwards from the halfway mark. To put this into perspective, the first E3 demo for Halo 2 took this long to produce.
  • What Could Have Been: Halo was originally slated to be an RTS on the Macintosh, later an FPS on Mac OS and Windows. The unveiling trailer was even shown at an Apple conference to demonstrate the Mac's (and Open GL's) graphical capabilities, though the game at that state looked significantly inferior to the final product. Features that did not make it to the final game, such as wildlife, were highlighted. The co-op campaign could be counted as this, seeing as Anniversary confirms that Linda was the inhabitant of the second cryotube.