HALO: COMBAT EVOLVED
Halo: Combat Evolved completely revolutionized the industry when it first launched in 2001, to the extent that it wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that if not for this game, first person shooters as we know them today simply wouldn’t exist, especially on consoles. Funnily enough though, it wasn’t even a first person shooter for a significant chunk of its development cycle. Bungie was initially developing Halo as an RTS. Some time later, they changed gears and turned it into a third person shooter, even planning on including open world elements. Of course, a couple of years later, Bungie was acquired by Microsoft, and tasked with releasing Halo just a year later as a launch title for the original Xbox- and in the span of a single year, they reimagined it as a first person shooter, conceptualized all of its mechanics and how it would control on a gamepad, and finished development on what would go on to become one of the greatest games ever made.
