On The Last Days of War (Halo 2).

This has been a long time coming. A way too long time coming. I mean this actually took place in April of 2010, almost a year ago. Way to go, me.

If you care about it, you probably already know what happened, but for those who are still intrigued, here’s a little synopsis. Halo 2, which would be the sequel to Halo: Combat Evolved, had its Xbox Live servers turned off. What does that mean? No more online play over Xbox Live on Xbox or Xbox 360. Without going too far down this road, it’s actually a unique thing and a problem historians are facing. YES! There are Video Game historians that are trying to preserve the history of Video Games. The problem is you can always save the code and whatnot, but you can’t recreate exactly what it was like to play multiplayer on a massive scale. It’s a little easier with games like Halo 2 because you can sort of copy it by having LAN sessions. The real problem comes in with MMO games. Those you can’t just fire up. Ok, that is not the topic at hand. So, Halo 2. It was such a popular game. When the game came out people were so excited. I still remember the launch date : 11/9/2004. Midnight launches are pretty commonplace these days, but they were not so much when Halo 2 came out. I remember I missed school to get Halo 2. Yeah, it’s nerdy and a little extreme, but I don’t regret it at all. Although reception of the game was mixed, tons of people played it. I remember when Xbox 360 first came out most people just used it to play Halo 2 while waiting for some more meaty titles to be released.

When I heard that the Halo 2 servers were being shut down I decided to take one last night to fire up H2 and play some games. It was fun and here is some pictures of the events. It was fun because almost everyone had the same idea so there were plenty of people playing. Dedicated fan base. So dedicated that it took Microsoft a long time to actually turn off the servers for good because some people were playing marathon sessions and apparently it was against their policy to kick people still playing. Anyway, here is to you Halo 2, thanks for all the fun times.