Halo: The Master Chief Collection celebrated its 10-year anniversary on November 11, 2024. Below, take a look back at the quiet sense of loss that permeated throughout the main trilogy.
Halo: Combat Evolved opens with waking up. Halo 3 concludes with falling asleep. Between is death. It’s fun, of course. It’s in space and exaggerated: a holy war between Americanized space marines and zealot aliens who find a common enemy in the zombie “Flood.” I don’t want to pretend that Halo is anything other than a blockbuster FPS. Yet, there is something sad about it, isn’t there? The Halo rings themselves are all machines of death: tools of mass eradication. But all have sunrises and sunsets, wildlife, plants, ecosystems, snowy mountains, and rocky deserts. They have the texture of life, albeit carved in with ancient tech that outlived its creators and resounding with the sound of gunfire. Master Chief wanders through it all. One man, no matter how great, enveloped in majesty and terror. The original trilogy, despite its massive scale and gigantic stakes, comes down to intimate tragedy: just a man and the ghost in his head.
It’s hard to remember that Halo: Combat Evolved was stark and bare. Since its release, there have been multiple miniseries, a television show, an abandoned movie project, dozens of novels, and real-time-strategy spin-offs. It is a downright multimedia phenomenon (though not all of its projects have been successful, in terms of popularity or quality). It is a universe that has been thoroughly elaborated on, with many of its gaps plastered over.