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| Re: Halo - a look back over seven years | |
| Posted By: GheoFabulousDuk <bencschwartz@gmail.com> | Date: 11/16/08 1:37 p.m. |
In Response To: Halo - a look back over seven years (Louis Wu) My entire life, I have been a devout mac addict. I was born in 1990, so I was the prime age to catch a number of classic milestones--my first game with Myst, on my dad's lap. My true love, though, came in the form a disc my best friend Paul had. MacCube, a disc full of tiny arcade-style classic games--Joust, Tubular Worlds, Solarian II, Koji the Frog--classics. The disc had two standout pieces, though, that we nigh-worshipped. They were only demos of the full game, but being six years old, we didn't have the money to buy the full versions. So we just played the first three levels of Pathways Into Darkness and Marathon over and over and over and over again. It was love at first game. At some point, I became addicted to the internet, and discovered the Marathon Story Page. I was in heaven. As a huge sci-fi geek, the revelation that my childhood gaming love was ALSO a mind-blowingly genius sci-fi epic was... nigh-overwhelming. Fast forward to somewhere in the middle of the summer, 2003. I'm with Paul, at our usual summer haunt--his grandparents' farm, on a tiny island off the coast of Seattle. Up here, there are no modern computers, no consoles, no TVs... so our refuge is replaying the old MacCube demos on his grandparents' ancient Mac. Then one day, Paul's father, an ergonomic engineer, comes and tells us that he's working for a new group--Microsoft has asked him to help design a better Xbox controller. As such, they sent him an Xbox, four prototype controllers, and a copy of Halo. It was our job to test the controllers. Five hours of Halo a day for a week, cycling through the different controllers. I don't think we realized that the same Bungie was behind Halo and PiD/Marathon until about halfway through the week. After that, though, it was open season. We played through the campaign at least twice, ogling over every detail and reference to Marathon. Many, many fond memories, sitting on an old mattress in the attic of a dusty barn, playing Halo with my best friend. Over the next few years, as Paul and I drifted apart, Halo always the point we could reconnect over. When he moved to Canada for a year, his first visit home happened to be the week of Halo 2's release. We went to a mutual friend's house, and played it for eighteen hours straight. When our friend's mother kicked us out the next morning, in a desperate attempt to get us to see the sun, Paul ran over to her minivan, just pulling out of the driveway, and tried to jump on the side door, yelling, "HOLD X TO BOARD ENEMY VEHICLE!" When the Halo 3 Starry Night trailer aired on TV, I TiVo'd it on my giant-screen TV, and called Paul up. He came over, and we spent a solid two hours going over every detail of it, frame by frame. It was great. So yeah. There you go. Here's to fifteen years of Bungie first-person shooters. Thank you. ~Duk
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