Halo (franchise)
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_logo.svg){kind=logo} Logo used since Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary | |
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| First release | Halo: Combat Evolved November 15, 2001 |
| Latest release | Halo: Campaign Evolved July 28, 2026 |
Halo is an American military science fiction video game series and media franchise, originally developed by Bungie and currently managed and developed by Activision and Halo Studios (previously 343 Industries), part of Microsoft's Xbox Game Studios. The series launched in November 2001 with the first-person shooter video game Halo: Combat Evolved and its tie-in novel, The Fall of Reach. The latest installment, Halo: Campaign Evolved, a remake of the original Combat Evolved campaign newly powered by Unreal Engine 5, was released in July 2026. Spinoffs include real-time strategy and twin-stick shooter games.
Bungie began as a developer of computer games for the Macintosh platform, making games including Marathon 2: Durandal (1995). After the company was acquired by Microsoft in 2000, their in-progress game, which started life as a real-time strategy game, became Halo: Combat Evolved, a first-person shooter and exclusive launch title for Microsoft's Xbox video game console. Following the success of Halo, Bungie developed additional Halo sequels before and after regaining its independence from Microsoft in 2007. Microsoft established 343 Industries to oversee Halo going forward, producing games itself and in partnership with other studios.
The developer was restructured and rebranded as Halo Studios in 2024, in conjunction with shifting the series away from being developed on proprietary game technology and multiplatform availability. Following the release of the remake Halo: Campaign Evolved in 2026, Xbox announced that Activision would produce Halo games, with Halo Studios supporting released titles.
Halo: Combat Evolved was the Xbox's flagship "killer app" and cemented Microsoft as a major competitor in the video game console space, and its sequels pioneered online matchmaking, social features, and video game marketing. The games have sold more than 81 million copies worldwide, with several titles being listed among the greatest video games of all time. With more than $6 billion in franchise sales, Halo is among the highest-grossing media franchises of all time, spanning novels, graphic novels, comic books, short films, animated films, feature films, fan-made short machinima animations and other licensed products.
Story
[edit]Millions of years ago, the Precursors, a powerful intergalactic species, seeded the Milky Way with life. One of their created races, the Forerunners, attacked their former masters and drove the Precursors into near extinction. A few Precursors transformed themselves into dust, intending to regenerate themselves in the future. This dust became defective over time, and began infecting and contorting organisms throughout the galaxy. The resulting corruption created a new parasitic species, connected by a powerful hivemind: the Flood. Spacefaring ancient humanity, fighting the Flood, also came into conflict with the Forerunners. After defeating humanity, the Forerunners reduced humanity's technology and species to a primitive level, while they concentrated on the threat of the Flood. The Forerunners conceived the Halo Array—ring-shaped megastructures and neural eradication weapons of last resort that would destroy all sentient life in the galaxy to stop the Flood's spread by starving it of biomass. The array could be activated from the Ark, a repository of sentient life outside the range of the Halos. Exhausting all other options, the Array was activated, ending the Flood outbreak. The surviving Forerunners reseeded life and left the Milky Way galaxy.
Nearly a hundred thousand years later, in the 26th century, humanity—under the auspices of the Unified Earth Government, or UEG, and their United Nations Space Command, or UNSC—colonizes many worlds thanks to the development of faster-than-light "slipspace" (similar to hyperspace but slower, with passengers requiring use of cryogenic pods for long-haul flights) travel. Tensions between the government and colonies desiring independence sparks violence and terrorism. The UNSC's Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) creates the SPARTAN-II Project to create an elite group of enhanced supersoldiers to suppress the rebellions. In the year 2525, human worlds come under attack by a theocratic alliance of alien races known as the Covenant, whose leadership declares humanity an affront to their gods, the Forerunners. The Covenant thus begin a genocidal holy war, in which their superior technology and numbers prove to be decisive advantages. Although tactically effective, the Spartans are too few and spread too thin to turn the tide of the war in humanity's favor. In the aftermath of the Covenant's invasion of Reach in 2552, humanity's last stronghold defending Earth, John-117 is left as one of the few remaining SPARTAN-IIs.
The rediscovery of the Halo rings prompts a desperate battle against the Covenant, who believe they are instruments of transcendence, not destruction. Master Chief and his artificial intelligence Cortana are essential in the destruction of a Halo ring to stop the Covenant and the threat of the Flood. Turmoil within the Covenant and the revelation of the Halo Array's true purpose leads to the Covenant splintering into civil war. The disgraced former Covenant commander known as the Arbiter, along with many of his species, helps the humans stop the Covenant leadership from activating the Halo Array via the Ark. The Human-Covenant War ends.
In the post-war era, the UNSC trains a new generation of Spartans, and tensions between the UNSC and rebels resume. The Master Chief and Cortana accidentally free the Forerunner commander Didact and he briefly returns to assert supremacy over humanity. Master Chief and Cortana halt his plans, although Cortana is initially believed dead in the attempt. Cortana's survival through the Domain leads her to break with the UNSC and assert a new hegemony over the galaxy, with artificial intelligence (the "Created") in control.[1] After two years of a scattered war between Cortana and the UNSC, Cortana attacks the Banished, a mercenary organization of former Covenant races. The Banished win the resultant conflict, terminating Cortana and battling the UNSC for control of Zeta Halo.[2]
Game series
[edit]| 2001 | Halo: Combat Evolved |
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| 2002 | |
| 2003 | |
| 2004 | Halo 2 |
| 2005 | |
| 2006 | |
| 2007 | Halo 3 |
| 2008 | |
| 2009 | Halo Wars |
| Halo 3: ODST | |
| 2010 | Halo: Reach |
| 2011 | Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary |
| 2012 | Halo 4 |
| 2013 | Halo: Spartan Assault |
| 2014 | Halo: The Master Chief Collection |
| 2015 | Halo: Spartan Strike |
| Halo 5: Guardians | |
| 2016 | |
| 2017 | Halo Wars 2 |
| 2018 | Halo: Fireteam Raven |
| Halo Recruit | |
| 2019 | |
| 2020 | |
| 2021 | Halo Infinite |
| 2022 | |
| 2023 | |
| 2024 | |
| 2025 | |
| 2026 | Halo: Campaign Evolved |
2001–2010: Bungie games
[edit]
Video game studio Bungie was founded in 1991 by Alex Seropian in Chicago, Illinois, who partnered with programmer Jason Jones the following year to market and release Jones' game Minotaur: The Labyrinths of Crete. Focusing on the Mac game market because it was smaller and easier to compete, Bungie became a preeminent game developer on the platform, releasing the successful Myth and Marathon. Bungie began development on a new game in 1997, referring to it by the temporary code names "Monkey Nuts" and later "Blam!" after Jones could not bring himself to say the previous codename to his mother.[3][4]: ix "Blam!" was conceived as a science fiction real-time strategy game and took place on a hollowed-out world called Solipsis. The planet eventually became a ringworld called "Halo", in turn giving the game its title.[5]
As the development team began experimenting with incorporating vehicles with realistic physics simulations, they began moving the distant third-person camera closer to the action. Bungie decided it would be more fun to directly control units than direct them, and the game shifted to a third-person shooter.[5][6] Halo was announced on July 21, 1999, during the Macworld Conference & Expo. The title of the game was finalized only days before it was announced at Macworld.[6]
Bungie was undergoing financial difficulties, and Microsoft was looking for games for its upcoming Xbox video game console. In June 2000, Microsoft announced their acquisition of Bungie, and Halo—now having morphed into a first-person shooter—became a launch title for the Xbox video game console.[5][6] Relocated from Chicago to Redmond, Washington, Bungie had roughly 14 months to finish the game before the Xbox launched. The story slowly began to take shape, with an internal debate at Bungie over how much personality to give the main character. Writer Joe Staten wanted to do more than have the player character be an "empty vessel" like Half-Life's Gordon Freeman, so they wrote him with a sense of humor. Deciding he should be referred to by his naval rank, Bungie decided on "Master Chief". Despite a difficult and hectic development schedule, Halo: Combat Evolved shipped as a launch title for the Xbox on November 15, 2001.[5][6][7]: 112–113 The Xbox's marketing heavily featured Halo, whose green color palette meshed with the console's design scheme.[8] Halo was a critical and commercial success, selling alongside half of every Xbox sold.[9] By July 2006, the game had sold 4.2 million copies and earned $170 million in the United States.[10]
Halo: Combat Evolved introduced many elements common to the franchise. Players battle enemies on foot and in vehicles to complete objectives across a mysterious alien landscape. Halo limited the number of weapons players could carry to two, forcing them to carefully select their preferred armament.[11] Players fight with ranged and melee attacks, as well as grenades. Bungie referred to the "weapons-grenades-melee" format as the "Golden Triangle of Halo".[12] The player's has health measured in hit points that must be replenished with health packs, but also has a perpetually recharging energy shield.[13]
While Halo had not been intended as a franchise, the Bungie team wanted to make an ambitious sequel, looking to story and gameplay ideas that had been ultimately cut from Combat Evolved, and inspired by how fans had received the game.[6][14] In particular, Bungie was surprised by how many fans used the System Link capability to network consoles together and play multiplayer in LAN parties. With the launch of the Xbox Live online multiplayer service, Bungie wanted to bring Halo multiplayer to the internet.[14]
Halo 2, was announced on August 8, 2002, at Microsoft's X02 press event,[15] and an impressive demo of the game was shown at Electronic Entertainment Expo the following year. The demo showed off new features like dual-wielding weapons and hijacking enemy vehicles, but behind the scenes the game was undergoing a troubled development; Bungie had to scrap the ambitious graphics engine as it would not run effectively on the Xbox hardware, leadership changes resulted in more infighting, and artists and designers wasted time developing assets that would ultimately not ship in the game. A planned massive multiplayer mode was entirely cut, leading to developer Max Hoberman's smaller-scale local mode becoming the only multiplayer offering. As the game's release date slipped, the studio entered a sustained period of crunch to finish the game, with other Bungie games being canceled and their staff absorbed into the Halo team.[5][6][14] The final act of the game had to be cut entirely in the rush to complete the game.[6] Halo 2 was released on the Xbox on November 9, 2004, and later for Windows Vista in 2007.[16][17] Part of the marketing took the form of an alternative reality game, I Love Bees, centered around a website apparently hacked by a mysterious intelligence. Over the course of the game, audio clips were released that formed a narrative set on Earth between Halo and Halo 2.[18] Halo 2 was a critical and commercial success, grossing $125 million in the first day and becoming the highest-grossing release in entertainment history up to that point; it would ultimately sell 8 million copies, becoming the best-selling Xbox game.