It's been 20 years since the first installment of the Halo series, but it's undeniable that Bungie's work on Halo: Combat Evolved and Halo 2 dramatically changed the video game industry in many ways. The first game was what started it all, but Halo 2 was arguably more revolutionary than Halo: Combat Evolved ever could be, due to Bungie being even more ambitious with the sequel. Halo 2 was first shown at E3 2003, and the demo got players extremely excited to play the game, with its incredibly innovative concepts and mechanics like taking over vehicles and dual-wielding weapons.
However, that trailer was not something that Bungie had really made with the final engine for Halo 2, nor assets that would then be used to make the actual game, but rather it was the presentation of something that had to be scrapped entirely. The game was far from being in a presentable state, and after that trailer aired, Bungie became fully aware that lots of work had to be put in Halo 2 for it not to miss its deadline of November 2004. The stakes were high, as there was a lot of pressure for the company to finish the product before Christmas 2004 due to the Xbox 360 launching the year after that, and so 18 months of crunch began.
Halo 2: Bungie's Crunch and a Brutal Development Cycle
The term crunch normally refers to working 50 hours per week or more, and that's something many developers at Bungie did for a year and a half to meet an impossible deadline. Halo 2 had not only the onus of being the sequel to Halo: Combat Evolved, but to surpass it to a degree by bringing something entirely new to the table. With a year and a half on its hands, Bungie had to start from scratch. This led to the Seattle-based company not having a working version of the game for over a year, with developers creating all sorts of assets without being able to test how they looked or performed in the game.
Some employees at Bungie would enter the office early in the morning and not leave until late at night, every single day, for months and months — which ultimately led to physical and mental health issues, as well as interpersonal ones. Some developers would not see their significant other for days, working hard on trying to make Halo 2 a great game, despite all the features that had to be cut from it just to ship it on time. According to then-Design Lead at Bungie, Chris Carney, the Halo 2 crunch was the most brutal development cycle the company had gone through, and there was a lot of negativity surrounding the deadline.
Halo 2 was the game that changed the online multiplayer experience in gaming forever, and while the idea stemmed from its predecessor, there were times when Bungie felt like this feature wouldn't make it into the final cut. Even the story was a shell of what Bungie had initially planned, and the ending to Halo 2 was abrupt and a cliffhanger precisely because the company would have needed a few more months to at least make an extra two or three missions to get the game in a better spot. Instead, after the awful crunch of Halo 2, Bungie became a much more efficient organization, and it managed to turn the missing pieces from Halo 2 into what became Halo 3.
The battle against crunch at Bungie was not immediately over after Halo 2, but it continued up until the release of the first Destiny game, and only really concluded when Destiny 2 launched. That's when development crunch became more of a personal choice for developers to undertake, and none of Destiny 2 was made with the crunch culture in place. Instead, the company learned from what happened 17 years ago, and it vowed to never revert to that ever again. Thus, Halo 2 did not only change the gameplay standards of its time, but it also highlighted the importance of healthy development cycles for the whole industry.
Halo: The Master Chief Collection is available now on PC, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S