I spent my childhood as a Sega fanboy. Even though I loved Nintendo games I was fiercely loyal to my chosen console, in that daft way that kids are. I’d argue at school with mates about who would win in a fight between Mario and Sonic (Sonic would absolutely destroy him), extol the virtues of Streets of Rage 2, and insist that the Saturn would smash N64 and PlayStation (oops).
Fast-forward to my young adulthood and suddenly the Sega of old was no more, and watching games like Shenmue 2 release on Xbox felt oddly like betrayal. But that was nothing next to seeing Sonic appear on the Nintendo GameCube. What madness was this?
Luckily I’d already swapped one console war for another, having been an early adopter of Xbox. I fell in love with Halo and would go head-over-heels for Halo 2, and lived for years with a magazine poster for Halo 3 behind my television with that magical promise: “Finish the fight.” I did do other things, I promise, but I spent an awful lot of time with the Master Chief, and Xbox and Halo became synonymous in my mind with peak console gaming.
Halo has fallen a long way since those heady times. Microsoft has never really been able to replace Bungie, and of course in one of those crazy twists the onetime Halo studio is now owned outright by Sony and PlayStation, and gearing up for the release of Marathon. The last entry in the series was 2021’s underwhelming Halo Infinite, and the next is going back to the source: Halo: Campaign Evolved, a complete remake of the original.
These days I game almost entirely on PC, have long left console wars and platform loyalties behind, and watch from a distance as the traditional console makers struggle to find their place in the contemporary ecosystem. Nintendo remains unique, while Microsoft and Sony arguably dilute their once-dominant brands in pursuit of a much wider audience. So it’s weird that, reading about the new Halo coming to PlayStation, I get that sense of resentment once more.
Halo: Campaign Evolved is going to launch on Xbox, PC and PlayStation 5. Two leads from Halo Studios (the re-branded 343 Industries) have given a new interview to PCG sister site GamesRadar+ explaining why the once-iconic Xbox mascot is now going to be on Sony’s platform and, I’m not gonna lie, I’d rather Microsoft had just released it without saying anything at all.
The glory days!
“We hope to bring along the series veterans who have been with us for the past 25 years on the Xbox and PC platforms, and have them be able to play with this entirely new generation,” says Damon Conn, executive producer on the game.
“Maybe [it’s] people who have never been exposed to Halo, because they’ve always been on Sony product, or maybe they just missed it, or maybe they switched consoles at a certain point, and they want to kind of come back together.”
There’s some verbiage about how “the original is a masterpiece” and so on, before we get to the quote that really made my jaw drop.
“We’re able to honor the Halo legacy on PlayStation,” says Conn. “It’s just paving the way to expand our Halo universe, that’s how we see it.”
Man. You know, I didn’t think I really cared about Master Chief anymore, but something about that quote shows me I do. I think I’d long given up on Halo returning to the glory days, we just live in a different time, but some part of my love for the series clearly lingers on. Maybe that is silly nostalgia, but the idea that the Chief can “honor the Halo legacy on PlayStation” just feels like a twist of the knife. RIP Chief, RIP Xbox, and RIP to the good old console wars. It was fun while it lasted.
