The end of a gaming era. Six years ago, Bungie showed off Halo 2 for the very first time. Let’s see… 2003, that would make me 15! In February 2010, Microsoft had announced that they would be dropping online support for the multiplayer aspect of Halo 2 and that day finally arrived on April 15, 2010.
Halo 2 was basically the key reason Patrick and I went halves on a xbox back in the day (halves? hilarious, I know). Halo 2 was how I spent much of Grade 11 and 12 back in high school. I’m just now realizing this is probably the videogame I’ve played the most… in my life. I remember often pulling all-nighters with Jimmy, Spencer, and Matthew as we “schooled N00BZ with our L33T SKILLZ” into the wee hours the next morning.
In honor of the game, on April 15 9pm-2am EST developers at Bungie went online to play a couple final rounds with the public, to give it a fitting send off. “See you on the battlefield, Seventh Column. One last time”.
Halo 2 was the most popular video game on Xbox Live, and even held that title until the release of Gears of War for the Xbox 360 nearly two years later. By June 20, 2006, more than 500 million games of Halo 2 had been played and more than 710 million hours have been spent playing it on Xbox Live, and five million unique players on Xbox Live. Halo 2 is the best-selling first-generation Xbox game with 8.46 million copies sold worldwide, with at least 6.3 million copies sold in the US alone.
Check out this post where Bungie asked some of their key developers from Halo 2 to share some of their fond memories of the game.
Montages such as the one below have been cycling around the interwebs where gamers have put together some of their favorite memories from the game.