After years of storing player statistics and other data for the early installments of the Halo franchise in the original Bungie website, halo.bungie.net, Bungie stopped updating those stats nine years ago. For the memories, they did keep them available on the site for players to look at and reminisce about time spent with those early Halo games. But buried in an announcement yesterday on Bungie's current website between news of updates and issues in Destiny 2, Bungie stated it would be removing those player stats permanently and the original site will be shut down in February.

It's a rather sad way to mark the occasion of Halo: Combat Evolved's 20th year anniversary. This game that started it all was released back in 2001 as the flagship title for the fledgling Xbox console, a console that would begin to put Microsoft on the map as a player to be considered in the gaming marketplace. Halo: Combat Evolved was a key ingredient to the console's success, a game that innovated first-person shooters on gaming consoles and is often considered one of the greatest games of all time. Bungie's success with Halo: Combat Evolved led them to develop more beloved games in the series: Halo 2, Halo 3, Halo 3: ODST, and Halo Reach. But in 2007, Bungie split from Microsoft, with Microsoft retaining the Halo series as intellectual property.

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March 31, 2012, marks the day that Bungie ceased updating player records and hosting new user-generated content on halo.bungie.net for Halo games, officially handing off the Halo franchise to its current developer, 343 Industries. Now it seems that the player content that has been enshrined since then will be permanently lost as of February 9. This statement can be found under the "Dust and Echoes" section of Bungie announcements released yesterday.

Halo bugs

Bungie is encouraging players to save their content in any way they can if they want to. Any player material related to Bungie forums or news was incorporated into Bungie's current website, bungie.net, back in 2013, so that material might still exist after halo.bungie.net goes offline on February 9. Bungie's focus has been firmly on the development and improvement of its Destiny franchise for years now, so while this announcement is certainly sad for many Halo fans, it isn't shocking.

For fans feeling nostalgic for the joys of the original Halo trilogy after this news, Halo: The Master Chief Collection is an incredible outlet for old-school Halo players to relive the glory days. It continues to receive updates and contains all of the early Halo games including Halo 4. So save those screenshots and statistics and maybe get some friends together over chat to play The Master Chief Collection and keep the memories alive.

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Source: Bungie.net