Working Title 09.18.09: Working Hypothesis - What if Halo Had Stayed a PC Game?

Posted by Jordan Williams on 09.18.2009

To many, Halo not only evolved combat, but it evolved one of the most popular genres of the industry for the new generation of consoles. But what might have happened if Microsoft never bought Bungie and Halo remained a PC game? Working Title examines...

Welcome to the #1 Column to not make an off color joke about Kanye West or fish sticks but will call Megan Fox a dumb ho…WORKING TITLE.

Yeah, it just seems like the world is once again wrapped up in what that KRAZY KANYE will do for attention, if course the person/people laughing this up is MTV because once again they can feign that they have their finger on the pulse of all the gossip because something big happened at the VMAs for the first time in God knows how long.

I will say that if by some miracle they manage to make another Def Jam Vendetta game I hope they put Kanye in it. I'll leave it at that.

Last week I kicked off a new series in which we took sort of an alternate look on video game history. We all know how most of the biggest stories in video games begin and we can sort of tell how they end but what if they just took a slant turn and veered of into unmarked territory? Well this is pretty much what this series is about. Last week I talked about what could've happened if Nintendo after the failure (to an extent) of the GameCube decided that they wanted out of the console game and went for software only. Well this time I am going to look at another giant moment in gaming that could've very well happened.

Working Hypothesis – What If Halo had stayed on the PC?
Author's Note: The name of the series has been changed out of respect for Greg Bruno's What If column. …So go read his, too!

Seeing as Halo 3: ODST is going to hit shelves soon. I find it just a little bit fitting that we go ahead and look at what very well could've happened if Microsoft did not buy out Bungie and thus get the Halo game onto the Xbox in the first place. It would've remained a PC/Mac game and for all we know it might've cut a DEEP cut into the Xbox's success. So what do I think would've happened?

Halo would've been ported to the Xbox

Now just because Halo would not have been on the PC does not mean for one moment that Microsoft would pass up the change for it not to be on its console. I have full faith that Halo would appear on the Xbox, the thing is I think it would appear as a port and not have the giant fanfare that it had. Seeing as it would be built as a PC game you would see it in much of the same was a PC game loses some of the controls and playability when it gets moved to a console. I am not one of those people who gets too deep into the Keyboard and Mouse vs. Controller War (although I use an Xbox 360 controller on 90% of the PC games I play) but there are many who believe that WSAD beats the shit out of BAXY when it comes to FPS games especially. Unless the game was being built from the ground up to work on BOTH PC and Consoles, it is a pretty sure bet that the console port of the game wouldn't be exactly right around the corner. Meaning that the game might be a bit of an afterthought or even worse, a rush job when it came out. This does not mean that Halo would've been a bad game. It just means that there would've been a huge possibility that Halo as we know it might've been a PC game first and a console game second…and treated as such.

Xbox Live would've taken longer develop and roll out
Xbox Live would've still happened; it is sort of a natural progression of console gaming seeing as PC gaming has done it for just about forever. The thing is without a game like Halo pushing the need to have that giant multiplayer network gameplay (like Halo 2 had and damn near pioneered for Microsoft) I think it would've taken longer for Xbox Live to make a big a splash as it did. Yes, there was online gaming before the Xbox on consoles, but it arguably became the viable smooth entity it did when Xbox Live really hit its stride. And that stride was on the back of Halo and other multiplayer games like it (more on that later).

So the question that we are left with is how long would it have taken for Xbox Live to really get going and to catch it's stride? Well seeing as there were 50 games that launched with Xbox Live support, you really have to look at which one of those (assuming Halo would be a PC-Centric game and not the forefront of Microsoft's line up) would they get behind the most.

…And I have no idea what that would've been. Call me cynical or just unknowledgeable but I have no idea what other game multiplayer game Microsoft would've threw it's weight behind had they not had some sort of Halo game to press on. And with its next big hit Gears of War not even being on the console I can't think of what multiplayer game would've propelled Xbox Live into its giant epic ass thing it is now. But I do know what single player game/development team would've made a bigger mark on the big black box.

Xbox would've struggled to gain a Killer App, Team Ninja would take advantage
Now I might be alone on this branch that I am about to go on, but usually when I think of the Xbox and another landmark title that helped solidify it as a success I think of Ninja Gaiden. Now I know there were other games like Amped, Unreal Championship, and Splinter Cell. But I think the one game that had sort of crossed most of those barriers and got people to go "Holy fuck look at this" was Ninja Gaiden.



Those super sneaky stealth games aren't for everyone. Hell, I personally am not a big fan of them because I feel sometimes they are too slow paced. And although Ninja Gaiden was famously hard, I think playing as a badass Ninja (who acts decidedly un-ninja like) who runs around just cutting a bloody swatch though dozens upon dozens of enemies appeals to a lot more people that SUPER AWESOME TRI-GOGGLED ACTION.
Yep. I'm getting comments about that one.

Either way, Ninja Gaiden did have a broader appeal to begin with, and I think without having Halo on the consoles and an exclusive and not making such a big splash that Ninja Gaiden could've very well been the stand out game of the Xbox's career. I also think Team Ninja as a whole would've gotten even more recognition than it had. Of course with it being so goddamn difficult it might not have been the BEST recognition, but it would have been recognition nonetheless. And although I have ragged on Splinter Cell a bit here, I think that that would probably be the only other game to be the stand out on the Xbox and perhaps if history had changed in that way maybe Sam Fischer would be the mascot of the Xbox or maybe Ryu Hayabusa.

Man, it just seems like Xbox was DOOMED to have a flat, one dimensional tough guy character as a mascot, wasn't it?

Comment section is down below.

The massive wave of FPS games in the current generation would hit PC first, console second (if ever)
This is another one of those that were bound to happen, but it just would have happened at a later date. Most PC Purists still say the home of the FPS is and will always be the PC. They control better, look better, and play better there. There are also companies that prefer doing FPS games on the PC rather than consoles like Valve.



But it can also be argued (and proven) that there has been a HUGE boom of FPS games hitting the consoles in this current gen, and the last gen. Now to say all of this was brought on by the success of Halo might be stretching it a bit much, but there is no way you can deny that the success of Halo did play a hand in what became one of the most popular genres of games in this generation. You can't go more than a few months without seeing a FPS game and for the really big ones they are usually referred to as Halo-Killers. Now, not all of them are great and the fair share of them are absolutely horrible (check my review for Darkest of Days in about a week…eugh) but the fact of the matter is that if Halo hadn't effectively proved that you COULD do a good FPS on a console we would definitely not see the FPS boom that we have now.

It would've been the same old trend that it was before. The PC got the higher end FPS games first, they were optimized there and built for the PC and then they would be ported down to the console(s) which would either mean that consoles got an inferior version, or they got them well after the PC release thus there wasn't much buzz for it. If you don't believe me look at any game that had a home on PC FIRST (meaning it was launched on the PC) and got ported down to consoles. Were they are warmly received, publicized, or praised. The list is pretty damn small. Even smaller for games that have a home on PCs like RTS and of course the FPS. So looking at it that way by the best case scenario we would've had FPS games that were on par with the PC counterparts, but were released later and to a system that had a smaller fan base for it. And then by the worst case scenario we would have gotten severely gimped versions of the games that came out way later and were not up to the quality of the PC counterpart at all.

So that means this generation very well might have been changed (some might say for the better) because we would've have such a rush of FPS games on the consoles, but then I honestly can't think of what would've taken its place. As much as some of us might be tired of the FPS genre as a whole, it's the one that makes the most money and the ones that most people get behind. FPS today is sort of what the platformer (like Zelda!!11) was in the 8-bit and 16-bit days. Every company made them because they were easy to make and when the John Q. Averages of the world thought of video games, that is mostly likely what popped into their head first. So just think something as insignificant as Microsoft NOT buying a company could change something so big like the most popular genre of console gaming at the time.

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Working Question
This is an idea for a column I was going to do, but I really couldn't figure out enough reasons to stretch this into a full column so I decided to downgrade it into a Working Question. So...what if Hot Coffee wasn't such a big deal that it had ballooned out into? What would be changed in how we view sex and nudity in video games?

Personally, I cannot picture any sort of situation to where Hot Coffee would have ever been received well. I mean I am all for games having nudity (it's rated M for a reason) but there is a very thin and penis shaped line between nudity and flat out porn. And this coming from someone who owns actual copies of RAPELAY AND BOTH BATTLE RAPER games. If by some miracle Hot Coffee would've gone over well I think we would see more games taking more chances with nudity and sex, but I don't think we'd ever see the likes of Rapelay and Battle Raper over here. Just too damn iffy.

How ‘bout you?

Until next time, I'm Jordan Williams…and I am sure that owning Rapelay and Battle Raper is nothing I should be bragging about (I got them as gag gifts from a Con).