Halo 2 burst onto the scene exactly 15 years ago and changed the way we look at online multiplayer, but it might be just as well known for the weird and wild “I Love Bees” ARG (alternate reality game) that preceded its launch. While Master Chief has faded a bit from the forefront of gaming’s most popular characters (along with the Halo franchise as a whole), this milestone anniversary still gives us a great excuse to talk more about another one of the most influential games of all time.
And believe it or not, it wasn’t even the biggest blockbuster to emerge from amongst the new releases of 2004’s penultimate month.
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Halo 2’s stranglehold on our collective imagination may have started with “I Love Bees,” but Anthony John Agnello of The Ringer has built a comprehensive history of the game, from Microsoft’s desire to brand the sequel as “a cultural event” all the way to its massive launch day sales numbers:
Halo 2 begins with a celestial siege. Thousands of alien lizard people, religious zealots with improbable jaws toting mean-looking laser swords inside their bulbous spaceships, crash into Earth to claim it as their own. Humanity’s only defense is Master Chief. The space marine is a walking tank whose face is a single head-sized Oakley lens. He’s gifted with a remarkable talent for blowing up whole squads of aliens. With the help of artificial intelligence embodied by what appears to be a nude, prophetic American Apparel model named Cortana and a turncoat alien called the Arbiter, ol’ Chief keeps humanity alive. Barely. It is patently ridiculous, an absurd action-figure collision as conceived by an 8-year-old drunk on Capri Sun and James Cameron movies. It remains, 15 years later, awesome. It became the best-selling entertainment release—not video game, but entertainment—of all time when it arrived on November 9, 2004.
When ‘Halo 2’ Invaded Planet Earth
Can you believe it’s also been 15 years since Valve released Half-Life 2? The game broadened the way we think about storytelling in shooters, but you could argue that it’s status as the flagship product for Valve’s then-nascent Steam store is its larger contribution to history. Though in the intervening years, the Half-Life franchise has expanded through the release of two episodic expansions, several fan remakes, and a certain spinoff franchise featuring a homicidal AI… though nothing in the way of a proper sequel.
That’ll change, to an extent, after the release of the recently-announced Half-Life: Alyx, but Ryan Cooper argues that the spectacular success of Steam has dulled Valve’s hunger to create unique video games in The Week:
For a few years after 2007, Valve co-founder and president Gabe Newell assured interviewers that the studio was working on Episode 3, and the company released a bunch of concept art to that effect. But then he clammed up, and the final installment never came. Indeed, innovative single-player games — what used to be Valve’s bread and butter, starting with their groundbreaking first game Half Life in 1998 — have completely vanished from their output. They haven’t produced one for eight years — Portal 2 was the last one up to this day.
Meanwhile, Valve’s focus has quite obviously moved to Steam. The platform, which serves as a one-stop shop for gamers to buy and download titles from nearly every major game developer, reportedly made roughly $4.3 billion in revenue in 2017 (as it takes a substantial cut of every sale), up from $3.5 billion in 2016 — and that doesn’t include revenue from downloadable content and “microtransactions” (that is, in-game purchases of cosmetic items and such). There is clearly a lot more money in being an Amazon-style distribution platform than in developing games. What’s more, that money is a lot easier to make. First-mover advantage and network effects do most of the work for you.
How capitalism killed one of the best video game studios
While it might seem hard to compete with Halo 2 and Half-Life 2, dozens of memorable games were released in the 30 days between November 1st and November 30th in 2004. Kotaku‘s Zack Zwiezen strolled back in time to shine a small spotlight on Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater, World of Warcraft, Metroid Prime 2: Echoes, and many others:
The end of the year is usually when some of the biggest and most anticipated games of the year finally release. So it isn’t unusual for a month like November or October to have two or even three blockbuster games dropping all in the same week. It happens.
But November 2004 had a lot more than just two or three great games. By my count, there were 15.
15 Years Later, November 2004 Might Still Be One Of The Best Months In Video Game History
Will November 2019 be as well-remembered as November 2004? Probably not, but I’m reasonably sure we’ll be gifted with quite a few retrospective retellings of the fervor around Death Stranding in November 2034.