Yesterday night I finished my first playthrough of the Halo Trilogy. In 2022, I promised myself that I would read more books, play more games, and do things that I always wanted to. It took me a while, but I did it.
I know that I’m roughly a decade late to the party. I also know that there is enough discourse on the internet about Halo and why it is great. This is not about the game, but what it means to me.
My family was one of the first families with an internet connection in the locality, and I remember very vividly playing a Mario clone on a dusty old CRT monitor, Need for Speed: Underground 2 in a Tata Photon + store for 100 Rs/hour, and a Need for Speed clone in my mom’s school computer lab with a wheel. These are experiences that I could never forget in my life, but due to the lack of a capable machine and accessibility, I was never able to play them myself. It was always a “limited experience”. In summer 2012, I went to a friend’s house. After a while, we got bored, and my friend brings out these two boxes. I didn’t know what they were and he told me they were his “video games”. I was expecting him to just start Vice City or Cricket 07 which were the only popular ones back then. But he didn’t do that. He told me that it was an Xbox and a PS2. Never heard of those names by then and didn’t understand what he meant by that. He connects it to the TV, inserts a disk, turns it on and music starts playing.Â
Halo: Combat Evolved.
New Game. Takes 20 mins roughly for the tutorial to end. My friend gives me the controller, which I’d never seen before, and the scene opens on Halo. The bright beams of light shooting into the sky, the scary atmosphere, and the familiar yet very strange architecture and colours of the buildings. And the music. Few hours later, we’re on the beach landing level on the warthog. Marines and my friends cheering me at the same time while I smash through the grunts. That memory, is burned into my brain. Core memory unlocked. I had to stop because my friend wanted to play something else. This time it’s PS2. Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell. He wanted to continue a level that he was in the middle of. My friends were playing this together, but my brain was stuck in Halo. Then I had to go home; time’s up. I looked up Xbox. It costs more than a month’s salary. And it ended there.
For some reason, I never really thought about Halo after that. I was playing games, but never the ones that I wanted to, just the ones that my friends were sharing with me. I remember the music and the landscape, they were in the back of my head, but never tried to play it. And in 2018 the Halo Infinite was revealed. The music hits. I immediately get pulled back to 2012. And almost a year later I get my first performance machine. But still I never had time to play with it because I was mostly using it to work or learn CAD. And then Covid hit.
In the same time I was rewatching Eva, I also watched the excellent documentary called Power On, which is basically the story of Xbox. I went ahead and bought the Master Chief Collection but didn’t really start playing it because it didn’t feel real. This is me, buying something that I want, to do something that I want. It took me a while to accept it, and I started playing. It took me months to finish Halo: CE. Weeks to finish Halo 2. And one night to finish Halo 3.
I think the reason why this is important to me is because I was able to actually finish something that I really liked. The happiness is not just because the nostalgia hit me with a grin on my face every time I was on the warthog, but also because I had the ability to do it all. This is probably not a self-actualizing need but a very self-satisfying one. It wasn’t a limited experience anymore. It was a liberating experience.