MAXIMISING THE MULTIPLAYER EXPERIENCE
NOWADAYS, ONLINE MULTIPLAYER FPS GAMES ARE EVERYWHERE, BUT IN THE NINETIES THERE WERE PREDOMINANTLY ENJOYED BY PC OWNERS, WITH CONSOLE GAMERS ENJOYING SMALLER LOCAL AFFAIRS ON SYSTEMS LIKE THE N64 AND PLAYSTATION. HALO CHANGED THIS, AS IT EVOLVED NOT JUST FPS COMBAT, BUT THE WAY WE ENJOYED PLAYING THESE GAMES WITH OTHERS
here’s no denying that at the time of Halo’s release, any new FPS worth its salt was essentially guaranteed a multiplayer mode.
Online play was becoming an essential part of almost any new game, but shooters especially wouldn’t achieve very much without it. And Halo, with its cinematic approach and rich lore, felt like its emphasis lay in the single-player, with multiplayer coming in as a feature to keep players hooked long after the credits rolled. But that just wasn’t the case. “Halo was multiplayer from the very start,” says Stefan Sinclair, a programmer on Halo’s multiplayer team. “In fact, for a long while, it was only multiplayer. For example when I started at Bungie in the summer of 1999, the only way one ‘played Halo’ at that time was to start up an instance as a server, and then others could then launch their instance of Halo as a client, connect to your server, and we all ran around in the world testing things.”