Esports come and go that's just the way things work. Nothing lasts forever
and the fact the matter is we're all just playing video games on product
cycles. The NBA doesn't have to release a sequel to basketball every two years but
most game publishers do which is often what leads to the death of the
corresponding esports scene. A decade ago Halo was the biggest game in North
American esports commanding a millions of dollars in prize money strong
viewership and millions of copies sold. Now its lucky to get 10,000 viewers on
Twitch on a good day. This is how Halo rose to the top of the
esports world.
"Final Boss your 2010 MLG National Champions.""
fell as hard as any game ever has.
"Michigan Sturgis ain't happening."
"AGL 10k is supposed to be next weekend
that's on you motherf*cker this is your fault."
And then somehow managed to put together a redemption story
"We're at the home of Halo baby. We got everyone here. This is our moment, our time.
So I ask you, get loud, get proud. Are you ready!?"
The original Halo was a huge deal for Microsoft.
Halo: Combat Evolved Rated M for Mature
It was the flagship game for their brand
new console the Xbox. In 2001 no one knew if Microsoft would sink or swim in the
games industry and Halo the cutting edge fast-paced first-person shooter
from little-known Mac developer Bungie was Microsoft the way of showing that
they knew what they were doing.
"with the power of the GeForce 2 GTS shading
rasterizer plasma burns look more realistic than ever before."
"Nvidia's GeForce 2 GTS and Bungie's Halo. This is the future of gaming."
The game was a hit, selling five million copies
and inspiring a small but dedicated base of competitive players.
Prize pools were small but players wanted organization so handful players
and fans banded together to create MLG an organization that would go on to make
Halo eports huge.
"MLG was kind of was born out of Mike and my love of video
games." "We were sitting there and I said why don't we just run one of these
tournaments and just see how it works." "It was a leap of faith."
A few years later Microsoft and Bungie launched Halo 2 which was better in just about every way.
The gameplay was better the maps were better even the sales were better with 8
million sold to Halo's five and that momentum propelled Halo to the top of
the North American esports scene. Europe had Counter-Strike and Dota. Korea had
Starcraft and NA had Halo.
(Casting)
The era of Halo 2 & 3 was dominated by legendary teams like
Carbon Final Boss and Str8 Rippin. In 2006 MLG worked out a deal with the
USA Network to broadcast MLG tournaments on TV and episodes were
later available on Xbox Live.
(Casting)
MLG ran dozens of Halo tournaments
between 2005 and 2007 and only stopped to bring in Halo 3.
Halo 3 cracked 14 million copies sold blowing its predecessor's out of the water and
throwing MLG's events into an even higher gear. Every Halo tournament MLG
ran gave it over $50,000 in prize money, higher than anything in NA at the time
with annual $280,000 championships
(Casting)
MLG quickly became the biggest esports tournament organizer
in North America off the back of their success with Halo adding Super Smash
Bros, Tekken, Rainbow Six, Call of Duty and Gears of War all to varying degrees
of success.
"What we did was go out and find all of the best kind of grassroots
level people who are running these great tournaments and brought them in and then
we really developed Major League Gaming."
Halo 3 was a great competitive game but only
after MLG and fans made a few small tweaks to the game's competitive
settings. Most notably pro players disabled equipment a new feature added
to Halo 3 that really changed the way the game was played but with all that
turned off Halo 3 was a great competitive game and it looked to be
carrying halo into a bright future, that is until Reach.
"Halo Reach falls, 2010."
It was no secret that Bungie and Microsoft were going through a breakup Bungie
wanted independence to make new games but their agreement with Microsoft meant
that they had to make a few more Halo games before they could finally get it
"It's such an important cultural ideal here that this studio owns what it
creates." "Independence was going to be the only thing that was gonna be able to
allow us to do what we wanted to do." "The deal was essentially we make a couple
more Halo games we leave Halo with Microsoft and we can split amicably so I
mean ultimately the price of our freedom was to to leave our baby behind to move
from being Halo developers to Halo fans."
So Bungie took a chance to experiment.
First came ODST, a mostly single-player game that didn't affect
Halo's competitive scene at all. Then in 2010 they put out Halo Reach a game that
carried forward Bungie's a legacy of excellent single-player campaigns but
evolved the equipment system from Halo 3 into something much worse for the
competitive scene. "You might be surprised to hear that when Halo Reach came out it
was met with backlash from the Halo community. I vividly remember the uproar
on the Bungie forums. There were threads upon threads of players upset with the
game claiming that it didn't feel like Halo and that everything that made Halo
great was gone. I vividly remember not enjoying the multiplayer for three main
reasons. Number one, the maps. Number two, the weapons and
number three, armor abilities." Reach had several problems equipment was replaced
by armor abilities. Abilities included active camouflage which made you
completely invisible. Armor lock which made you invincible before releasing a
pulse and damage and jet pack which let you fly.
"And then there's bloom there was
sprint there was there was armor lock that was in the first MLG
tournament, there was jet pack and all that stuff does not belong in Halo
Thanks to a new bloom mechanic, full auto had no spray pattern it was entirely random
accuracy meant stopping which was a far cry for the way top players had
experienced Halo in the past.
"There's so many things that are wrong with this
game that can be fixed in a very small amount of time and that needs to happen
during this four month offseason that we're gonna have with MLG, okay."
Bungie and later 343 Halo's new development team eventually
let players turn off bloom and armor abilities and even let them have default
starting load outs, but by then the game that competitive reach players were
experiencing was so far from what the average player was playing that they
weren't even the same game. They still ran reach but it was second to
Starcraft 2 and League of Legends which were quickly picking up steam in North
America thanks to strong development support. MLG only ran a handful of reach
events but the community shrank alongside their game and MLG had to
remove Hslo as the flagship game on their circuit.
"The halo was just is just
headed down man."
But if Reach shrank Halo's community then it was Halo 4 that
truly killed it.
"We've really focused on trying to craft these moments that live
up to the legacy of the Halo experience." "We're working within the constraints of
what makes Halo Halo but trying to make every aspect of it bigger and better.
343's first foray into developing a Halo game of their own was
something of a disaster on all fronts. The game sold 4.79
million copies but the disappointing single-player was coupled with an
absolute a mess of a multiplayer experience. There was no online ranked
play the launch maps were terrible and not only were armor abilities still
around they were part of the unpopular loadout system from Reach.
"There has been something done to this game that wasn't enjoyable
the matchmaking experience has to be better. The game has to be more fun and
obviously you know I'm gonna sit here and ranks, spectator mode, make the game not
suck go back to the formula. The online experience has to be better you don't
have to reinvent the wheel for your matchmaking experience when Halo 2
when halo 3 both paved the way for this.
It just wasn't Halo anymore MLG ran
exactly one Halo 4 tournament the week the game came out leaving a lot of people
to question exactly how legitimate it was given there were accusations that
some players had access to the game early.
(Casting)
After the sheer number of people who left Halo during
Reach, Halo 4 was a death blow for an already small community. Fans tried and
tried but no one could find a way to make competitive Halo 4 fun and
balanced.
"And then yet again they also didn't give us a real ranking system
that we could see like they saying that we couldn't do it. And they
took forever to fix the bolt shot and the maps were kind of iffy and they
still had sprint and the four shot BR came like six months later."
In MLGs absence other tournament organizers rose up to fill the gap.
Arena Gaming League ran tournament between 2012 and 2013 but collapsed amidst
allegations that employees in tournament winners weren't being paid.
"They're like, "Oh yeah we're gonna have f*cking Halo 4". And then
oh wait three weeks before people have already bought team passes for Halo 4.
F*ck you we're switching to Halo 3. No refund f*ck off right? And then they cancelled
the event because Ebash, which is where they were trying to hold it in
Indianapolis wasn't even created yet it was still being built and Brad just
decided to market it and pocket that money. It is important to know all the
way up to AGL 10, Brad played favorites with who he paid out. Besides a select
few no one no one got paid dating all the way back to AGL 6."
All that were left were the hardest of the hardcore playing in small grassroots tournaments
attempts were made to move back to older games the way that Super Smash Bros
Melee has survived more than a decade after its launch but the community was
already too small to sustain a further fragmentation. Halo was well and truly
dead.
But there is a happy ending to this story in 2014 343 put out the Master
Chief collection along with a port of Halo 2's multiplayer mode which
brought a lot of lapsed pros and fans back into the scene.
"It's extremely smooth it felt very clean and the 60 frames per second all that sprint was
taken out of the game which means a lot more setup based game types are being
played."
(Casting)
The game wasn't perfect,
and took a long time to get fixed but it was a step in the right direction
one that 343 followed up with Halo 5 just a year later.
Halo 5 replaced armor abilities with spartan abilities, always on traits
that every player had constant access to with the option to turn individual
powers on or off for competitive play. It got back to default starts back to solid
map design and away from killstreak gimmicks trimmed from CoD.
It was a return to form.
"The shooting is definitely really really
like easy but the movement makes it much harder to shoot than like any other like
Halo I feel like. And then plus MLG coming back they run events so well it's
a blessing to have MLG it's crazy. MLG events are events one of a kind."
"Halo 5 brought us the first ever Halo title with a live spectate option this
means you can jump into any players live film and watch on a 1 minute delay
whether it be a pro player whether it be one of your buddies, with the one minute
delay it had its limitations. This leads me into my second point of what Halo 5
has done well and that is the observer mode in Halo 5 now observer mode allows
us to join in any lobby and watch without that one minute delay not only that it
has enhanced viewer information on the user interface to see each player shield,
whether they have a powerup, what weapons they have nades they have selected,
with the right guidance and hopefully with some more tweaking in Halo infinite
the next title, we could see a really classy spectate slash observer mode.
Halo 5 also had esports support from Microsoft on day one following up the
two seasons of the Halo championship series they played on the Master Chief
collection. After that the league moved to Halo 5 and Microsoft boosted the
prize pool to 1 million. The Halo community brought that up to 2.5 million
dollars in 2016 and the 1 million dollar prize pool stuck around
for the next two years.
(Casting)
Halo still doesn't pick up massive
viewership but it's in a much better place than it was even two years ago.
Pro teams are coming in to give pro players salaries, prize pools are
sustainable and viewership does trend upwards during major events.
(Casting)
Put it all together and we can learn at least one important thing from Halo and it's
fall from grace. If you make a good game people are going to play it and if you
make a bad game, well you better hope the community can hold on long enough until
you make a better one.
(Casting)
"Halo, it's finished."
"No, I think we're just getting started."
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