layer!” Is there
a voice clip
I’ve heard
more in my
life than Halo’s
gravelly
announcer
preparing me
for combat? Maybe one of his other
callouts: “Double kill.” “Triple kill.”
“Overkill!” (OK, now I’m just
bragging). If there’s anything truly
and utterly timeless about Halo, it’s
that voice playing over the warm
blue sky and dusty fields of Blood
Gulch. Halo: Combat Evolved, now
released for The Master Chief
Collection on PC, looks today
exactly as it always has in my
mind’s eye: the same as it was on
chunky CRT TVs at splitscreen
LAN parties, the
same as it was on
the PCs in my
high school 3D
modelling class.
My memory, of
course, is wrong.The Xbox and
gaming PC and
CRTs I played on in the early 2000s
couldn’t run Halo at 144 fps, and they
definitely couldn’t do it at 4K. If I
went back to them now, I’d grimace
at the low resolution, and how
sluggish it actually felt to hop across
Blood Gulch. But this new version of
a near-20-year-old game is sharp as
hell and more responsive than ever,
even if its polygons are old enough to
drink. Making a game look and sound
like it does in your memory, but not
newer, is the delicate balancing act of
The Master Chief Collection, which
343 Industries is bringing to PC this
year one Halo game at a time.
There’s no detail too small for the
fans to notice. Case in point: another
classic Halo sound, the respawn beep,was slightly different in the original
PC port, made by Gearbox in 2003.
When 343 created Halo: Combat
Evolved Anniversary for Xbox, that
PC port served as the foundation. But
a few things weren’t right, which
they now have an opportunity to fix.
“That respawn beep is so iconic,
you know what I mean?” says Sean
Swidersky, associate producer on The
MasterChiefCollection. “Betweenthe
twoversionsthereis a differenceinRIGHT: Halo: Reach
debuted big on Steam
with about 150,000
players at launch.BOTTOM LEFT: Halo:
Combat Evolved’s
campaign got a big
makeover in 2011.“OUR PILLARHEREIS
TO ALIGNTOTHE
LEGACYGAMESAS
BEST WECAN”Halo: The Master Chief Collection
FEATURE
tone ... I think our pillar here is to align to the legacy
games as best as we can.”
“It does get super complicated,” adds senior producer
Mike Fahrny. “Just because we have source assets and
code and all that stuff, it isn’t a magic bullet most of the
time. It does require a lot of digging.
“There’s a lot of rabbit holes we go down. And then
you add the fact that TMCC is all these things in one,
right? It gets very, very complicated.”
Over the course of a long day at
343 Industries in Redmond,
Washington, I talked to the team
ending Master Chief ’s PC dry spell
about the success of Halo Reach in
December, all the intricacies of
retrofitting old games for new
hardware, and got the scoop on the
latest release, Halo: Combat Evolved.
When Mike Fahrny started on the
MCC team last year, the first thing he did was go out and
buy an ultrawide monitor. They didn’t have one, and he
knew ultrawide support would be one of the features PC
fans asked for. “I’m a PC enthusiast. It’s one of the reasons
they brought me in,” he says. “We have a lab set up that
can do various hardware settings, and then flighting
was really key for us in having the successful launch
that we did. I think one of the big mistakes that
studios developing for PC make these days is they
do it kind of in a vacuum. We decided very early
on we didn’t want to do that.”IT’S COMPLICATED
This ideology of ‘flighting’ – essentially beta testing- started at 343 Industries before The Master Chief
Collection came to PC, but it’s hard to overstate
how transformative it’s been for Halo. Back in
2014, TMCC’s release on the Xbox One was
something close to a disaster. Online play