After the studio was bought by Microsoft,

Bungie rewrote the game engine for the Xbox.

The hardware’s development and the game’s

formation came together in tandem, the final

version of the Xbox console enabling the full

extent of Bungie’s ambition for the game.

Halo defined an entire gaming generation –

the result of a well-worked game mythology,

an iconic character in Master Chief and an

awesome split-screen multiplayer that kept

us hooked long after its brilliant campaign had

finished. Incidentally, the ‘Combat Evolved’

part of the title was added at the insistence

of Microsoft, which felt the game needed a

more descriptive title than simply Halo, a title

which Bungie stuck to rigidly, and this was the

compromise. Halo set a new benchmark for

all shooters – other would-be FPS developers

would now really have to up their game. On

the N64, Rare had set its own definition of a

great FPS in 1997 with GoldenEye 007, and

another of the OG Xbox’s defining games was

TimeSplitters 2, by former GoldenEye 007 devs

Free Radical. The lighthearted counterpoint to

Halo’s more po-faced universe, TimeSplitters 2

was a brilliant and varied FPS involving time

travel and fast, split-screen multiplayer.

Ryan heir

The next big leap in shooters came courtesy

of Steven Spielberg. The director had made

war epic Saving Private Ryan in 1998, and got

his Dreamworks Interactive studio working on

a WW2-themed game – Medal Of Honor. This

paved the way for 2003’s Call Of Duty on PC.

Developer Infinity Ward was made up of MOH

veterans and created the first COD using id

Software’s Quake III engine. The series evolved

to become a genre titan, thanks to Call Of Duty

4: Modern Warfare. Taking a controversial leap

into the modern age with settings echoing

the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts, it was the

online multiplayer that set the world alight.

By introducing a levelling system, it kept

players coming back for more and jumpstarted

the idea of games as service. For years, the

franchise felt untouchable, but elsewhere,

DICE was impressively creating conflicts of up

to 64 players and emphasising squad play in

its Battlefield series.

et us briefly return to a time before Halo,

or ‘BH’, as we’ll henceforth never refer to it.

Pioneer of the genre, id Software developed

Doom and Wolfenstein 3-D in the early ’90s,

inspired by MS-DOS game Ultima Underworld:

The Stygian Abyss (a first-person RPG with

texture-mapped environments where you

could, gasp, look up and down). Doom was

so successful that long before the term FPS

was coined, other FPS games were known as

‘Doom clones’. Around this time, Chicago lads

Alex Seropian and Jason Jones, influenced

by id’s work, were making the Wolfenstein-

homaging Pathways Into Darkness for the

Apple Mac, as the fledgling Bungie. Unveiled

at the 1999 Macworld Conference, this

was going to be another Mac game from

Seropian and Jones. They’d already by this

point enjoyed success with FPS Marathon on

the Apple computer. But in 2000, Microsoft

bought Bungie, and its upcoming Halo project

became the Xbox’s flagship title.

Originally, Bungie’s vision was actually

closer to Destiny with open-world exploration,

but as the team grew, it changed from a

third-person shooter/strategy game to an

FPS. The game’s iconic Warthog shaped the

game’s direction the most. According to

game designer Jaime Griesemer, “In the old

RTS-style game it was just so cool to watch

a squad of jeeps driving across the terrain

we wanted to drive them ourselves. Then we

wanted to get out of them and run around as

an infantry guy, and from there it snowballed.”

“Doom was so successful that before

the term FPS was coined, other FPS’s

were simply known as ‘Doom clones’”

ABOVE BioShock

took the FPS to

another (below

sea) level.

FAR LEFT The

original

Wolfenstein 3-D.

LEFT

L TimeSplitters 2.

056 THE OFFICIAL XBOX MAGAZINE

OXM INVESTIGATES