Halo 2’s E3 level will become playable, 21 years later

As spotted by Kotaku, Halo 2 is celebrating its 20th anniversary in the best way possible: by finally releasing the most spectacular gameplay demo that we never got to play.

In the grand scheme of things, few gameplay previews created the same hype levels as Halo 2’s gameplay reveal at the ’03 E3. Halo: Combat Evolved looked fantastic when it came out, but Halo 2 looked almost next-gen in comparison.

Sadly, though it was indeed a gameplay presentation — not the usual CGI cutscene most studios nowadays use for game reveals — the release version featured only a severely toned down version of the original Mombasa mission. The devs explain the mission was only created for the presentation and wasn’t originally intended to be part of the game. The mission ended up going nowhere as its source code was in poor shape, due to it having been hastily put together just to show something cool at E3. That’s all understandable, but you can’t make the coolest gameplay demo of all time and expect people to be ok with never getting to actually experience it.

Take a look below, and you might get what I and the fans have been wanting for so long:

I know it probably doesn’t look all that extraordinary nowadays, but that’s totally due to the low image resolution — probably. Jokes aside, sure, shooters have grown way more impressive than that during all the time Microsoft wasted in not making the demo playable, but there’s still a lot to love here. The entire thing is a living and breathing set piece, from the moment Master Chief lands to see the barracks, passing by the city’s bombing by an enemy of a never-before-seen size, to the highway chase. This was blockbuster FPS action like we’d never seen before.

Once again, though Microsoft is cool for allowing it to happen, the key players here were fan modders. They were the ones who picked up the code to work it into a playable state, and it must have been rough. Of the ordeal, Kenneth Peters had to say, “In many ways this is harder than Alphamoon to work on, as it was never made to be played “off script.” Oh, and the scripts. Well over 3400 lines of barely documented haloscript originally written under an insane time crunch almost two decades ago, which itself was made to work around various bugs of the engine at that time. Not a joy to decipher and translate into the modern engine, to say the least.” and, “We have seen things… things a programmer wouldn’t believe… “

But, it seems like the work is now finished. The New Mombasa level is apparently as playable as it deserves to be, and finally ready to be enjoyed by everyone.

The legendary level will finally become playable as a Steam Workshop mod on the Master Chief Collection on November 9th.