Cresting the first hill on Spasm, Halo comes full circle.

“If you can at all help it, don’t be a launch title.” – Jaimie Griesemer, GDC 2002

One wonders if Bungie felt a twinge of regret as they compiled Halo’s gold master in Fall 2001. Maybe they were too exhausted to feel much of anything. Nonetheless, the game had shipped, and its ten month crunch had finally come to an end.

As businessmen, they’d go on to triumph: Halo carried Microsoft’s Xbox, smashing all of its sales targets within the year and surpassing the coveted million mark by April of 2002.

Retailers reported Halo’s attach rate as high as 86% in some countries. A copy of Halo sold every ten seconds every day for nearly three years. It launched a console, a brand, and turned the page for a genre that hadn’t hadn’t had a hit on consoles since 1997.

But as artists? Halo would leave scars. Despite incubating at Bungie since Marathon: Infinity, retail Halo CE came together in less than a year. Most of the ideas driving its five year concept stage never saw the light of day.

To ship the game on time, testmaps and other environments were kitbashed into a single player campaign. Entire missions were axed and turned to cutscenes. When that approach left Halo with no playable third act, the level design team made the player run their maps backwards.

As the game further narrowed its scope, Bungie’s artists plugged whatever holes they could. Rather infamously, Halo’s multiplayer team scrapped everything and started over with four months to go. It’s a miracle the game was released at all.

Decamillenium:

I think it escapes us how much time has passed since then. After all, Halo has been out of Bungie’s hands longer than it was in.

By next year, Bungie’s tenure with Destiny will overtake their time spent with Halo. The fans, too, have changed– And in an industry that moves at nothing less than light speed, I still find myself with one or more limbs stuck in the past. It’s projects like Digsite that keep me holding on.

A crack team of sanctioned software grave robbers, the Digsite crew is performing Halo necromancy. No asset is too obscure. Digsite will find it, rip it, and get it in-engine. Long lost weapons, ancient levels, forgotten foes– Each pulled from the soil by reverent hands.

After months of radio silence following Digsite’s announcement, all that spelunking has produced Crash Site: An incredible vertical slice of Halo circa 1999, Post-Macworld and Pre-Microsoft.

But Crash Site is more than a mod, it’s a portal through time. When Halo left the Mac and was cut, crunched, and otherwise curtailed for Xbox– Fate saw Spasm and its ilk buried. Halo’s Macworld Level won’t even load on a console. Make no mistake, this is something we were never supposed to see again.

But it’s not just looks. Whether you’re scouting Spasm or cruising the Doozies on Infinity ‘99, the ‘Site series is playable, polished history. The Digsite Team’s expertise has gifted us with one of the best Halo levels in recent memory, and laid the groundwork for hundreds more.

Halo fans need to play this.

Thank you, Digsite. You’ve made, remade history.