HALO BEFORE HALO
1999
It's 1999 and Blam! is Bungie East's main project. Myth II released and a portion of the team splintered off to work on a never released project named Phoenix (little is known about the game besides the fantasy setting along with some 3d assets and concepts related to the project). Everyone who wasn't a part of Phoenix joined the Blam! team. The game was still early on but the story and lore was beginning to form around it. At this point, Bungie was yet to reveal the game to the world but in February they began teasing it to fans. marathon.bungie.org, a popular fansite for Bungie's other sci-fi fps series Marathon received a mysterious email from [email protected]. This email was a cryptic poem that was not dissimilar to the artificial intelligence ramblings from Marathon. This would be the first of five letters to the Marathon fan site in a lead up to the public reveal. In September, a 6th letter was hidden on the disc for an updated version of Myth: The Fallen Lords.
In mid 1999, Blam! had made enough progress to be announced publicly. In May during E3, Bungie showed off Blam! for journalists behind closed doors. Word leaked out to the public that Bungie had shown off the new game code-named Blam! despite NDAs. Weirdly enough, on May 20th a Myth II fan site that was dead for about a month prior was suddenly updated with what would be Blam’s final name: Halo.
Macworld
Peter Tamte just joined Bungie after a stint working under Steve Jobs at Apple. He helped get the perfect spot for Bungie's reveal of Halo to the world, Apple's MacWorld New York event. This venue was fitting for a company best known for their games on the Mac. There was just one large issue: it MacWorld was two weeks away and the game didn't even run on Mac and was still running on a PC. Bungie still had yet to get the game running on the Mac's OpenGL framework.
The game wasn't goiung to have sound working on the Mac before the show was set to be so composer Martin O'Donnell was tasked with coming up with a soundtrack that could be played at the same time as the demo on a CD. Joe Staten gave him a few key words to describe the music, "Ancient. Epic. Mysterious." Marty came up with the famous Halo melody on his drive home from work. Marty and his composing partner Michael Salvatori composed a 3-minute track and recorded it with an orchestra. The music was burned to a CD that was flown to New York and accidentally stepped on and broken. Thankfully, Marty brought a spare.
July 21st, Steve Jobs took the stage in New York to begin the MacWorld presentation. Steve Jobs went over the newest advances in software and hardware for Macintosh computers. Near the end of the keynote, Steve brought out Jason Jones to show off Halo as part of Jobs's promise for greater support for games on the Mac. Jason rushed over his introduction and went to the Mac to start the demo. If you closely you can see Jones was visibly nervous as there was a bug that couuld crash the game right after starting it. Luckily, that bug didn't come up and the demo played smoothly.
Gallery
