This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.
The original was posted on /r/hobbydrama by /u/lynndotpy on 2024-02-13 23:14:13.
Xpost from another Halo sub, with some changes.
If you know Halo fans, you know they’re always pissed about the games.
The hatred towards 343 Industries for their releases are well documented. But you might be surprised to learn that controversies did not start with 343i’s first release, Halo 4.
Nor did the hatred start with Halo: Reach for its armor abilities and retcons.
Nor did the hatred start with Halo 3 for its equipment and lcak of a PC release.
Nor did the hatred start with Halo 2 for its Arbiter missions, vehicle hijacking, and buggy, butt-cheek ridden PC release.
Nor did the hatred start with the release of the first game, Halo CE.
No, Halo was hated by Halo fans ever since Bungie left Apple to become a Microsoft exclusive.
This is the untold story of the origin of Halo gamer rage. One of a fanbase alienated, decades ago.
The story of Halo, the mysterious sequel to Marathon
The context: Bungie’s devout followers were Mac gamers, excited to see the followup of Oni and Marathon. Halo was touted as a dramatic technological leap forward, hyped with ARGs and worldbuilding.
But before it was Halo, it was the untitled “Blam!” project. Scant leaks slipped through the lips of NDA-bound playtesters.
It was 1999 when Steve Jobs introduced Jason Jones to debut Halo at MacWorld.. Over the coming year, screenshots of a mysterious world with the best graphics people had ever seen would drop in increasing numbers, with scant lore drops, with promises of a technologically advanced simulated environment.
Being Halo fans, there was much lore speculation about Halo and how it might tie to Marathon.
You can see in the archives of halo.bungie.org how dedicated these fans were. There’s analyses of quotes, theories trying to answer “who’s that cyborg?”, and, of course, the Cortana Letters.
The community was composed of ravenous, thriving, technical Mac gamers. This was a time when people had their own websites, running on their own servers, built by hand from HTML and CSS and gifs running on kilobyte modems. The computer was a shrine which connected people to an underground world of adherents.
It might be silly to think of now, but at the time, people were buying the best Mac desktops they could so they could run Halo, with their old computers running mail-servers and web-servers, if they were so lucky as to have DSL.
For many, Halo was the shining point of the optimism which encapsulated the coming year 2000. Un-fricking believable things were coming. This is how PC Gamer described it, October 1999:
The game is Halo and our first look at it blew our minds. It’s set in a future in which the human race is on the run from a ruthless alien race called the Covenant. As billions perish on humanity’s colonized planets, a human military unit decides to make a last stand on an ancient ring-shaped structure thousands of miles in diameter. The surface of this bizarre stellar body is a lush natural environment. It’s on this “halo” that mankind will stage its greatest battle.
and
Halo has us on the edge of our seats. It might well be the next huge advance in multiplayer action games.
Of all the mysteries, there was exactly one thing people knew for certain: Halo for the Mac was going to revolutionize the real-time strategy genre.
Then, Bungie ruined Halo.
It started as as a string of pains and rumors. Myth wiping hard-drives, Bungie tight on cash, rumors about acquisitions, and all the while Microsoft was looking for something to make it feasible to make a name in the console space.
But the rumors were quickly confirmed.
To this day, this is still considered the darkest day for Mac gaming.
The vitriol was voluminous. Kilobytes of gamer range spewed at Bungie from all directions. People felt they knew Bungie personally, and they felt betrayed.
Over 12 years later, Mac gamers would describe that day as “apocalyptic”.
The IRC logs
To address the kilobytes of vitriol spewing at them across message boards, emails, and IRC, Bungie hosted a moderated Q&A on IRC. They opened the chat moments at a time to respond to questions.
The chatlog is here:
Give it a read. Takes range from skeptical to unhinged, unbridled anger. My favorite is Adezj, with their typo-ridden takes:
5:31 PM: Adezj -Why O Why didnt i take the blue pill and stayed in wonderland
when Halo was going to be released on PC and Mac?!
Really, read the chatlogs. Keep in mind, this was the least vitriolic place people were
When Halo ultimately released on November 15th, 2001, it wasn’t to longtime Bungie fans. The Halo fanbase that spawned from there was majority new players, who did not even know Halo was once an RTS for the Mac.
TLDR: When Bungie sold to Microsoft, the excitement for Halo turned to the vitriolic gamer rage we know today. Halo fans have hated Halo since before Halo even had a name.