Halo

Platform: Xbox
Developer: Bungie
Release: 2001

Fast-paced, over-the-top action is a hallmark of Unreal Tournament

In the mid-'90s, many gamers thought Bungie had reached its creative zenith with Marathon. They were wrong. By the time the classic Mac and PC shooter had wasted millions of man-hours worldwide in 1999, the Bungie wizards were repackaging Marathon's rich story and innovative visuals into a next-generation first-person shooter. That game was Halo: Combat Evolved.

Ironically conceived as a real-time strategy game based on the Myth engine, Halo was soon retooled to show the future of war from the foot soldier's point of view. However, the game's hero was no ordinary grunt. Players got to slip on the MJOLNIR power armor of the Master Chief, an enigmatic supersoldier tasked with saving humanity from the Covenant, a conglomerate of alien races united by their religious zealotry.

Halo featured some of the best-looking aliens this side of Subcommander T'Pol.

However, it would be hard to find a group of sentient beings more fanatical than Halo players. That's because the game's 17 hours of firefights could turn a Zen meditation master into an itchy-trigger-fingered adrenaline junkie. Seconds after he crash-landed on the Ringworld-like massive structure known as Halo, the Master Chief was hunted by hordes of Covenant troops. In an inspired touch, each Covenant rank had its own AI: Lowly grunts attacked en masse but scattered when caught solo (or when their superiors fell); mid-rank jackals took a craftier approach, rolling and strafing; the hyperaggressive elites lived up to their namesakes; and the hunters--well, let's just say we've seen what a fuel rod cannon can do up-close, and it isn't pretty.

Bungie attached several now-classic gameplay elements to Halo's already compelling Starship Troopers-like combat. While controversial at first, the two-weapon limit added a welcome touch of realism, forcing players to strategically choose between human slug-throwers and Covenant plasma arms. The inclusion of vehicles enhanced gameplay exponentially. After bogging around Halo's artificial landscape in the near-indestructible Warthog assault four-by-four, the Master Chief got to drive a Scorpion tank (complete with cannon), the Covenant Ghost antigravity skimmer, and the Banshee close-support aircraft.

If only my car were this sturdy...

Though it came a year before Xbox Live, Halo's multiplayer component still stands out. Up to 16 people could engage in massive capture-the-flag or elimination bloodbaths over a LAN--a deliriously fun, if prohibitively expensive, proposition. However, Halo was one of the first next-generation console FPS games to offer co-op play, letting you and a buddy take on the Covenant together--a refreshing break from one-on-one deathmatches.

However, it's often the little things that separate the good game from the great game, and Halo was filled with brilliant details. It threw in not one but two whiplash-inducing plot twists involving a horde of fungicidal zombies and a cheerfully apocalyptic artificial intelligence. The game's still-dazzling visuals created a vibrant, breathing alien world, the hidden history of which was only hinted at. You always got a sense you were only scratching the surface of a much deeper narrative. That subtlety also extended to the Master Chief's mysterious background; his origins are never explained, other than the awestruck "He's here!" uttered by his fellow space marines or the terrified "It's him!" screamed by Covenant grunts.

No one can deny Halo's wider cultural impact. Besides inspiring the cult classic Red vs. Blue machinima series, it also spawned three novels that were acclaimed in their own right, thanks to author Eric Nylund (who wrote two of them). Its influence could also be seen in a series of concept SUVs, including Peugeot's eerily Warthog-like Hoggar. However, the most persuasive evidence of Halo's quality is its enduring popularity. The week of February 15, 2004--nearly two and a half years after it was released--the already triple-platinum title was EB Games' number 11 overall bestseller.