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Halo 2 E3 2003 demo will be playable in Halo: The Master Chief Collection on PC

As part of the 20-year anniversary plans for Halo 2, the legendary E3 2003 demo will soon be playable as a mod in The Master Chief Collection.

Ozzie Mejia

November 4, 2024 12:05 PM

Xbox

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It may be hard to imagine for younger generations who may not have been born during the franchise's glory days, but there was a time when Halo captivated imaginations across the gaming globe. That sense of wonder was captured in a single moment in 2003 when Xbox and Bungie offered a first look at Halo 2 through an unforgettable E3 demo. While Halo 2 is an all-time classic, the contents of that demo weren't actually playable. For the game's 20th anniversary, the Halo Studios team and dedicated members of the community have made the Halo 2 E3 2003 demo playable for the first time through the Steam version of Halo: The Master Chief Collection.

The news comes through a post on Xbox Wire. Halo 2's E3 2003 demo will be available through the Steam Workshop as a mod for Halo: The Master Chief Collection. It comes more than two years after 343 Industries (now Halo Studios) announced it had begun exploring the idea. In addition to featuring everything seen in that showcase, it will include gameplay that ultimately didn't make the final cut for Halo 2. The Halo Studios team had been looking into this idea for some time, but kept running into issues with the original executable, a problem that only got worse as the number of original Xbox dev kits grew more scarce. It ultimately took members of the Halo community to help see this idea through to the end.

"Steven Garcia (known to the community as General_101) was vital in getting this scenario stood up and even improved over the original," Halo Senior Franchise writer Kenneth Peters said in Monday's Xbox Wire post. "He was a one-man army and did a significant chunk of the work in developing tools, updating scripts, and even arting the levels. Digsite team members Ludus, Neo Te Aika, Sean T, xScruffyDaSasquatchx, and Killzone then provided finishing touches to replicate the original demo experience and test for bugs. Without them, we would probably have only had a rather unceremonious drop of raw assets and that was it."

The Halo 2 E3 2003 demo will be available in Halo: The Master Chief Collection as a free Steam Workshop mod on November 9. As the "Steam Workshop" part of that statement implies, it will only be available to PC players for now. No word on whether Xbox owners will be able to get in on that action anytime soon.

Ozzie Mejia

Senior Editor

Ozzie has been playing video games since picking up his first NES controller at age 5. He has been into games ever since, only briefly stepping away during his college years. But he was pulled back in after spending years in QA circles for both THQ and Activision, mostly spending time helping to push forward the Guitar Hero series at its peak. Ozzie has become a big fan of platformers, puzzle games, shooters, and RPGs, just to name a few genres, but he’s also a huge sucker for anything with a good, compelling narrative behind it. Because what are video games if you can't enjoy a good story with a fresh Cherry Coke?