Halo TBK LXIX: 2004-2024 What A Long, Strange Great Journey It's Been

FyreWulff · November 2024

In Loving Memory of Zonkytonkman

When you first saw Halo 2, were you blinded by it's majesty?

20 years ago, Halo 2 dropped and changed a lot of our lives here forever, including mine. I met a lot of people here, eventually meeting a lot in person in PAX and elsewhere, that I still consider great friends and still talk to because of that damn game.

So many nights of capture the flag, slayer, assault, king of the hill. Getting standbyed, chasing people into the skybox, killing superbouncers, counter-superbouncing, dummyglitchers, counter-dummyglitching the dummyglitchers, and devolving to the point that we knew people had torn the game apart to the point that we knew how to shove the invisible player standing in the middle of our base out of the base with our wraith and back across the map... we spend a lot (a LOT!) of time with Halo 2.

The community here continued onwards with 3 and ODST and Reach, and while the TBK group name faded away with 4, people here did keep playing , along with 5 and Infinite.

So what happened with Halo 2 since that fateful day 20 years ago?

The original game shut down right before Halo Reach's launch in 2010

Unfortunately, the original game shut down 14 years ago. I did retain a copy of the clan list as captured here on the last official day here via my capture card: https://imgur.com/a/halo-2-clan-list-bees-knees-rsENp

You can read the PA forums thread of many of us trying to stay signed on as long as possible after the gates closed in this old thread here: https://forums.penny-arcade.com/discussion/116803/halo-2-game-over-the-last-person-just-got-booted-off/p1

There was a PC port of Halo 2 called Halo 2 Vista. Eventually that too was eventually shut down by Microsoft. Halo 2 would eventually be officially made available online again via the Master Chief Collection, which you can play to this day. Although most of the shenanigans have been fixed.

The infamous E3 2003 demo is now playable on PC

Just a week or so ago, thanks to efforts from the community and MS opening up the archives the E3 2003 demo is legitimately playable, for realsies, as a mod on Steam MCC. You can also use on the Winstore PC version with some manual work via Nexus. A very nice bookend to all the little bits of Halo 2's developments that the public saw and were discussed on this very forum. Unfortunately it's not available for Xbox players and there' s currently no plans to make it available on Xbox (as there's no plans to add mod support on Xbox MCC) There's tons of other cut Halo 2 content available as well as part of the "Digsite" project.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xOKd43qJcXU

In lieu of what would have usually been an image-laden first post full of funny images , most lost to the photobuckets of time (I have them backed up somewhere, just have to find them) this is now a thread inviting all Halo peeps past and present and future to share your favorite memories of any Halo (not just 2) on here before the forums get wiped by the rings in a few months. As I find stuff I'll post them in here too.