What Makes Halo Legendary

Twenty five years ago, there wasn’t a conventional gamepad control scheme for first-person shooters. I could carry all weapons at the same time. My health didn’t regenerate. Melee attacks and grenades often didn’t have separate buttons and weren’t that important in the overall combat loop. Vehicle physics weren’t as fun. Soundtracks weren’t dynamic. Enemies were dumb or were doing their best pretending they were smart. Halo changed that.

Twenty five years ago, backtracking was often severe: no shortcuts, go from the beginning to the end, then repeat in the other direction. Invisible level boundaries were common. Traversal was often slooow. Online matchmaking was in its infancy. Hitmarkers often weren’t really a thing, and animations weren’t always enough to compensate. Copy-pasted rooms and repetitive objectives were pretty much expected. Halo didn’t change that.

What Halo did is something even more special. It created a universe. No matter how solid the mechanics are, they only produce fun at intersections with something soft, something mushy, something squishy. In action games, more often than not, these are not just terrains, these are enemies. They are the spark which leads to the mechemical reaction. And in Halo, these enemies are obviously the Grunts.

The Grunts are cowards who make me feel superior in contrast to other alien races. In a space opera serious by its nature, their silly squeals provide the necessary comic relief. They’re easy to deal with but can still one-shot me with plasma sticky grenades, their only true rival in the competition of what makes Halo Halo. The Grunts are actually quite smart, but they never get the chance to show it. Bungie weren’t afraid to make something silly or dumb. They were afraid to make something lifeless and joyless, so they made the opposite.

“He’s going to kill us all!”, they yell. Yes, he will, and it’s going to be a lot of fun. Much longer than 30 seconds.