I played Halo: Campaign Evolved, and the cinematics show what the Halo series could have been

There’s a moment early on in Halo: The Emergence Campaign where I can stop thinking about remakes as a game for a second. I was watching one of its newly remastered cut episodes. The Master Chief, Captain Keyes, Cortana, the Pillar of Autumn, and pretty much everything around them just seems more cinematic than ever.

I played the original Halo: Combat Evolved in the early 2000s, and in my head, this is what it looked and sounded like. The first Halo title introduced intergalactic warfare to me long before Star Wars, and the cinematic adds enough small touches to enhance Bungie’s original work from decades ago.

The wide frames, lighting, and character models in the pre-rendered presentation were great, until one nagging thought popped into my head. Why haven’t we ever gotten a proper Halo show that looks like this?

Halo turns 25 this year. The franchise has decades of games, novels, comics, animations, short stories, and characters to draw from. Campaign Evolved somehow made the lack of good screen resolution even more frustrating.

Halo has always had cinematic DNA

Bungie’s Halo games often handled storytelling through in-engine cinematics. This gives games a consistent visual identity because the characters you watched during the story sequence are the ones you controlled seconds later. It also allowed for some fun interactions and experiments, but that’s beside the point here.

The series has occasionally taken a film-like route since then. Halo 2 Anniversary famously replaced its original cinematics with beautiful pre-rendered sequences, and Campaign Evolved now gives the original adventure the same treatment with completely rebuilt scenes. Seeing that method used in Combat Evolved surprised me.

The opening of Pillar of Autumn already contains everything that a sci-fi series needs. Humanity is losing the war against a powerful alien army. A mysterious ring appears in space. He hears the desperation from the UNSC crew. In the midst of this chaos, the Big Chief rises up as this great, almost mythical figure. Campaign Evolved presents those moments with enough visual detail that I could easily imagine watching them as part of a big-budget series.

Halo tried to reinvent itself quickly

We already had an expensive attempt to do it live, of course. Paramount+ is launching Halo in 2022 after years of development. I really wanted to love you. There were bits that I appreciated, especially some of the production designs, the Covenant battles, and occasionally seeing the sci-fi military spectacle that I imagined. But the great way of creation is lost on me.

The series created its own Silver Timeline, separate from the established continuity of the games, novels, and comics. This gave the writers the freedom to reshape characters and events, which is not inherently wrong. But when the show started to deviate too much from the identity of important characters like the Chief, it brought the whole thing down for me.

I won’t go into all the details of my experience with the show, but I will admit that Season 2 tried to build on some of the original strengths. The action scenes got better, and we finally got to the fall of access. However, the show continued to run its version of Halo before Paramount eventually canceled it after two seasons.

Creating art with a more established structure can be done very well. The first episode of Star Wars: The Visions it is a good example. It reimagined the entire concept in a completely different context and style, and did it very well.

The difference between Halo and Star Wars is that the former never spread its wings in this form of media. Halo was already a big name in sports, but apart from that, it had mostly experimented with animation, live-action miniseries, and other small projects. So when its highly-anticipated first TV adaptation finally arrived, taking the story in a very different direction killed its moment of screen creativity.

We already know that Halo works outside of games

Some of my favorite Halo stories have nothing to do with holding a controller. Halo Legends explored the universe through animation, jumping between different characters, eras, and art styles. Forward Unto Dawn took a more minimalistic approach, following the UNSC cadets during the early Human Covenant War before bringing the Big Chief into the story.

Neither project required a rewrite of Halo’s core. Forward Unto Dawn in particular showed how successful Chief can be when he enters someone else’s story. The character has a greater presence precisely because we spend time watching ordinary people react to him.

Then there are the novels. The Fall of Reach alone contains the Spartan-II program, the childhood of the Chief, Dr. Halsey, the Covenant war, the Blue Team, and the destruction of one of the most important human colonies, while Ghosts of Onyx can open a completely different corner of the Spartan program. There are decades of pending issues waiting to be resolved.

The universe has never lacked material.

The television series could even follow the characters around Master Chief instead of keeping him at the center of every episode. The Halo universe is large enough to support military drama, horror, political intrigue, espionage, and epic space battles without leaving its established history behind.

Campaign Evolved reopened the wound

Playing the first level of Campaign Evolved brought all this back. Watching those widescreen cinematics, I continued to take screenshots because the individual frames already resembled the images from the Halo production that I had been looking for for years. The designs of the Covenant are there, and the boss still has that majestic silhouette.

Halo Studios describes the Evolved campaign as a celebration of the story that started it all 25 years ago. To me, it also shows how little the starting point needs to change. Give me the Human Covenant War, the Green Team, and any scary encounters with the Flood. Let the Chief stay as a soldier whose personality shows in small moments instead of rewriting him as a regular television character.