Canceled Halo games, from Ensemble’s Halo MMO to Sabre’s Halo Online

Every since HaloSince its debut at Macworld 1999, Master Chief has been a fixture in the gaming industry. Master Chief is an icon of the franchise, having carried it on his shoulders for over 20 years.

In that time, we’ve heard of quite a few Halo projects that never saw the light of day. That’s far from unique in the game industry, and we wouldn’t be surprised if there were even more attempts that never became public knowledge. We decided to celebrate Halovember by looking back at those who we knew. The history of Halo is fascinating, from the first attempt at seeing Master Chief using a handheld console to our collaborations with Peter Jackson.

Halo MMO

Years before the 2009 release of Ensemble Studios’ real-time strategy title Halo WarsEnsemble had a larger idea. It was the team that is best known for creating Age of Empires, Age of Mythology, and other series. Many never got past the initial prototype stage. About half the team was focused in finding the next major hit.

Microsoft acquired Ensemble in 2001. It was difficult to get these ideas approved. The studio’s founder, Tony Goodman, considered the publisher “pretty risk averse.” All of this led to the RTS concept that became Halo Wars in-mid 2006. But Halo Wars wasn’t the only game in the mix.

Ensemble developed a PC MMO named Titan around 2004. The book states that Ensemble began development of a PC MMO codenamed Titan around 2004. The Pixels, Blood and Sweat, the project started as an original concept before adopting the Halo name and universe — and even then, Microsoft was aware of the project, but hadn’t given formal approval yet. According to ex-Ensemble Studios’ senior software engineer Dusty Monk, Titan had a $90 million budget.

Titan was to have been a massive-scale MMO in the Halo universe. It wasn’t part of the Halo timeline that players knew; it was set 100,000 years before the Halos had been set off. It was in production for many years, and featured mechanics that were far ahead of their time. The cover system was very similar. Star Wars: The Old RepublicAnother involved players being able to participate in public quests provided they were within the designated areas. Aside from concept art and mockups, most of the team’s progress on the game hasn’t been shown publicly.

Over time, Microsoft kicked off preparations to move the team to a new office that would support the game’s development and maintenance post-release. The Xbox 360’s success led to a lackluster interest in the PC platform as an option for Microsoft. Titan proved difficult to sell.

The studio thought that the Halo MMO would be a rival to the original. World of Warcraft. In an interview from IncGamers (now PC Invasion) , Monk attributed that sentiment to the fact that Ensemble’s lineup rivaled Blizzard Entertainment’s RTS franchises Warcraft and StarCraft. He said that while Blizzard was always a strong presence on PCs, Microsoft’s sights were set elsewhere.

“Microsoft, from its gaming division, was really changing directions,” Monk said to IncGamers/PC Invasion in 2010. “They were looking really hard at the Nintendo Wii and they were really excited by the numbers that the Wii was turning. This was about the time that Microsoft decided that its Xbox platform and XBLA really needed to go more in the direction of appealing to a more casual, broader audience.”

Halo Chronicles

Are you still remembering the Halo film that was canceled? One to be directed and produced by Peter Jackson. The ax came down in 2006, but that wasn’t the only Halo project Peter Jackson was involved in.

Announced at Microsoft’s XO trade show in 2006, Halo Chronicles was pitched as a narrative-driven episodic video game developed by Bungie and Jackson’s new development studio, Wingnut Interactive. In 2009, it was cancelled without any trace or footage.

In a Vice article from 2017, it was reported that Halo ChroniclesIt would be quite different than your typical Master Chief adventure. It featured two non-lethal weapons as well as a strong focus on melee fighting. The main character eventually would learn air skills, including long distance runs as well as the ability to transform into some kind of missile that could hit Covenant ships. All of this was related to the story’s main arc, where the protagonist would eventually become a Promethean and alter their bodies.

But during development, these ideas weren’t mixing together as planned. Similar problems arose in the film. Over time, cinematics director Joe Staten came to terms with the fact that he and Jackson, alongside the team of writers involved, couldn’t land a script with a satisfactory result. Although the project went through several iterations before being abandoned, there were some good ideas that ended up in other projects. Halo 4 prominently showcased the Prometheans, for instance, while the script of Blomkamp’s film District 9Similarities with Halo movie script. Some props were used in District 9 even ended up being altered versions of the props built for the Halo movie — the battle rifle is the same, only painted white, and the alien arm also made the cut.

Halo DS

Microsoft sold games before they had a company called Microsoft. MinecraftWe get a bizarre, but failed, attempt at adapting Halo on Nintendo hardware For the Nintendo DS handheld.

The fittingly named Halo DSMatt Casamassina, cofounder of IGN first revealed the portable Halo experience to the public. The news was shared by Casamassina in 2007 via an IGN Blog post, which has been removed since. The blog mentions the project and he also said that he has played the game.

“This was a fairly regular occurrence,” Casamassina told Polygon. “You’d go over to a development studio to see Game X and after they showed you that, they’d sometimes also show you their top secret Game Y. It’s been a minute but I seem to remember that’s how the version of Halo DS we previewed first came up.”

Back then, the thought of seeing a Microsoft exclusive as big as Halo on a Nintendo platform stirred outrage within IGN’s community. After readers called him a liar, Casamassina uploaded a video to IGN’s YouTube channel showcasing a live demo alongside former IGN associate editor Mark Bozon.

Casamassina performed a building of Halo DS on Nintendo’s handheld, hosting a local multiplayer match against Bozon. Top screen was a very close replica of Halo’s experience. The bottom screen had stylus camera controls and provided information, such as ammunition and health.

Cassamassina said that the game was fun, but the concept was only proof-of-concept. This wasn’t something where Bungie had been involved — instead, it was an unsolicited pitch from an unnamed “AAA publisher.” Asked about the project in an interview with Siliconera in 2007, Bungie’s Brian Jarrard and Frank O’Connor mentioned that they received “several” pitches for portable Halo games in those days.

Many believed that IGN created the video despite all this.

“We had a pretty good laugh when, after we showed off the game running on hardware and even demonstrated a multiplayer battle between two editors, some people chose to believe instead that IGN rendered everything as some sort of prank,” Casamassina says. “Or that we maybe took GoldenEye – Rogue AgentPerhaps you modified it? Let me be clear all these years later: We obviously didn’t do those things. We wouldn’t have even known where to start. The prototype you saw was probably a concept for a game that was being pitched by a studio. This happens all the time and the difference is you usually don’t see those pitches.”

From his perspective, Casamassina thinks that the project didn’t advance not because it didn’t have potential, but because of the business and partnership agreement it would require. Casamassina sees this as the reason why the studio allowed IGN to expose it as “some sort of last-ditch effort” to stir public interest and help their pitch.

Casamassina was asked if he believes that the Halo games on Nintendo Switch today would provoke the same fury, but Casamassina stated it would probably not.

“I think that was a moment in time,” he says. “For one, it was during a transformative period for Nintendo in which it sort of decided it wasn’t going to continue competing in the horsepower wars. The space was dominated by very different innovation ideas. As a result, Nintendo purists — at least to my recollection, and of course this isn’t everybody, but you felt a general sentiment on the message boards — seemed almost bitter. IGN was home to a very hardcore group of fans. And when something extraordinary came along — especially if that something felt competitive to Sony or Microsoft — Nintendo fans rallied behind it. I think that’s what happened a little bit with Halo DS and I’m not sure the ingredients exist today to replicate it.”

Project Certain Affinity

Certain Affinity was also mentioned in the Vice 2017 feature. Between 2007 and 2009, 343 Industries reached out to Certain Affinity to produce a Halo game — it was supposed to be a title outside the mainline entries, and lots of ideas flew around at the time. But before the contract was set in place to begin development, according to Vice, Halo Waypoint — Halo’s official online portal — took priority over the potential project.

“We pitched a bunch of ideas,” said Max Hoberman in the Vice story. “We had some really cool ones — I still have one to this day that I’m dying to make — and we all locked onto one that we were super excited about. The Halo Waypoint website was a great opportunity to get a contract set up. We decided to go on Waypoint, leaving behind all the things we had in mind. I won’t lie, I was pretty bummed. However, it helped to rekindle our relationship with Microsoft. Then we were invited on to work together on a multiplayer maps pack. Reach.”

Halo Mega Bloks

PtoPOnline, a YouTube channel shared an early 2017 video showing a Haggar project. This was the codename. Halo Mega BloksThe game was reportedly developed at studio n Space in 2013. It combines both the Halo worlds and Mega Bloks into one game. This is a new experience that aims to reach younger gamers than the ones Halo appealed.

Similarly to TT Games’ Lego series, Halo Mega Bloks presented toy-like renditions of the series’ iconic vehicles and enemies. To build various structures (bridges and turrets), the player needed to gather bricks. The project also included a 2-player co-op mode.

Back then, the community responded to the footage with surprise, and wondered why it hadn’t come into fruition. 343 Studios’ Bonnie Ross posted about it on the Halo Waypoint forums.

“Over the past few days, footage has recently made the rounds of an exploratory Xbox 360 project we worked on several years ago, known as ‘Haggar,’” she wrote. “Since then, we’ve received a lot of great feedback from the community. We prototyped Haggar with Mega Bloks. It focused on elements such as action, exploration, and user creativity that are found in the Halo universe. Haggar had a lot of fun ideas and invention behind it, but ultimately didn’t progress beyond the early prototyping levels that are shown in the recent video. This is just one example of several similar projects we have evaluated throughout the years — a process that we continue exploring on an ongoing basis.”

Halo Online

In March 2015, one of the games that we had on our wish list was made available as an exclusive PC game for Russia. Halo OnlineSabre Interactive and publisher ANOVA Systems were working on the project. It was intended to include microtransactions.

This is a modification to an earlier version. Halo 3’s engine, the free-to-play game would feature multiple Halo 3There are many maps available, but also some original designs. It was also supposed to take part of the franchise’s canon story, set after the events of Halo 3.

In the beginning of 2016, a closed beta testing took place, but it was only as far as Halo Online went. The game was finally canceled after several delays, a period in which “Microsoft failed to make decisions on the future of the project,” according to a staffer known as Fogeyman in a post on the social media platform VK.

It was amazing to see that the game survived for several years. ElDewrito was the mod creator. Halo OnlineThe project was maintained by ElDewrito until 2018. Microsoft was not happy with ElDewrito’s achievement of 12,000 simultaneous players. They threatened to take legal action against ElDewrito and ask him to stop the project. But this wasn’t the end for the group’s connection to Halo.

In the last post of ElDewrito’s developer blog, which can be accessed via archive, the group shared the news that 343 Industries began collaborating with them on the Master Chief Collection for PC, which released in late 2019.

We don’t know what the future holds for the Halo franchise after Infinite. But given the series’ track record, it won’t come as a surprise if yet another batch of similarly aborted projects come to light down the road.