Two Decades Later, Halo 2’s Iconic E3 Trailer Will Be Playable

Screenshot: Bungie / Kotaku

The coolest a part of Halo 2 by no means made it into Halo 2. If you’re in any respect a fan of the collection, you realize precisely what I’m speaking about: the “Earthcity” demo, proven off throughout Microsoft’s E3 presentation in 2003. That degree by no means made it into the total launch of Halo 2, however almost 20 years later, a playable construct is within the works, 343 Industries introduced right now in a weblog submit.

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Just to present you a way of how earth-shatteringly cool that is, right here’s my real-time response upon studying the information, copied straight from Kotaku’s Slack channel:

wait

no fucking approach

fucking

approach

gemr2cmt4p4t3p2m8mp2340u9[m[0m19t

sry sry

my face fell onto my keyboard

In the cold light of today’s fidelity arms race, you might not get this impression looking at the clip’s lo-fi visuals, but it’s hard to overstate just how spine-tingling Halo 2’s E3 2003 demo was. Two years prior, Halo: Combat Evolved—and this almost goes without saying—redefined the first-person shooter. But that game was set entirely off-planet, on a ringworld called Halo. The “Earthcity” demo showed a look at a broader Halo canon—the primordial ooze for a sci-fi universe that’s spanned decades of games, spinoffs, comics, novels, a canceled film, and a recently renewed TV series.

The general scenario of “Earthcity”—a human metropolis is getting attacked, you’ve gotta protect it—is more or less replicated during the second and third levels of Halo 2. And certain gameplay elements the demo shows off, like the ability to wield two weapons at once, were also included in the full game. But the plot details diverged. Near the demo’s end, Master Chief boards a ghost, a typical ground vehicle of the covenant, Halo’s primary antagonistic force. He tears it full speed down a highway. He crashes, and then the demo pivots from real-time gameplay (eye-poppingly impressive for the time) to a pre-rendered cinematic. A number of covenant drop pods fall from orbit, elites wielding energy swords emerge and surround Chief. He pulls out a plasma grenade.

“Betcha can’t stick it,” Cortana, Chief’s AI companion, says.

“You’re on,” he says.

In Halo: Combat Evolved, elites with energy swords were arguably the toughest enemy unit. Facing one or two was usually tough enough. But seven? In close quarters? The demo couldn’t have ended on a more precipitous cliffhanger. As a player, you knew how much danger Chief was in—and you needed to know how he, how you, would fight your way out of it.

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Though there’s no release date, 343 Industries is planning on making the stage playable in PC versions of “modern retail Halo 2.” (Halo 2 was released as a remastered version in 2014, which is also included as part of Halo: The Master Chief Collection.) The chance of it being playable on console is totally up in the air, in part due to the high technical hurdles for this endeavor.

“We originally didn’t have a lot of assets lying around for the map from previous analysis of leaked builds and the like,” General_101, a modder working with 343 on this project, wrote. “Just the source JMS files for the BSP and a few scenery objects. However, once the source map files turned up it was only a matter of time before we had all the data we needed.”

Beyond Halo 2’s E3 2003 demo, 343 is working with modders to add a ton of cut content to Halo: Master Chief Collection. For longtime Halo fans, there’s a ton of other fascinating stuff in the pipe, including the original elite models and a number of other renderings that never made the final cut. You can read it all here.