REMASTER CHIEF

Behind the scenes of HALO: THE MASTER CHIEF COLLECTION.

- Wes Fenlon

Slayer!” Is there a voice clip I’ve heard more in my life than Halo’s gravelly announcer preparing me for combat? Maybe one of his other callouts: “Double kill.” “Triple kill.” “Overkill!” (OK, now I’m just bragging). If there’s anything truly and utterly timeless about Halo, it’s that voice playing over the warm blue sky and dusty fields of Blood Gulch. Halo: Combat Evolved, now released for The Master Chief Collection on PC, looks today exactly as it always has in my mind’s eye: the same as it was on chunky CRT TVs at splitscreen LAN parties, the same as it was on the PCs in my high school 3D modelling class. My memory, of course, is wrong.

The Xbox and gaming PC and CRTs I played on in the early 2000s couldn’t run Halo at 144 fps, and they definitely couldn’t do it at 4K. If I went back to them now, I’d grimace at the low resolution, and how sluggish it actually felt to hop across Blood Gulch. But this new version of a near-20-year-old game is sharp as hell and more responsive than ever, even if its polygons are old enough to drink. Making a game look and sound like it does in your memory, but not newer, is the delicate balancing act of The Master Chief Collection, which 343 Industries is bringing to PC this year one Halo game at a time.

There’s no detail too small for the fans to notice. Case in point: another classic Halo sound, the respawn beep, was slightly different in the original PC port, made by Gearbox in 2003. When 343 created Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary for Xbox, that PC port served as the foundation. But a few things weren’t right, which they now have an opportunity to fix.