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If you have been gaming for at least 10 years, there is no doubt that there is one game that comes to mind that is either one of your alltime favorites or one you’ve played at least once: Halo. It all started in 2001 with Halo: Combat Evolved, which was released as the launch title for the brandnew firstgeneration Xbox. It was one of the Xbox’s most iconic video games, and the Halo series has since become a symbol for early2000s nostalgia and one of the highestgrossing media franchises in history. Really quite an impressive feat, but what if I told you that this almost never happened, and that Halo, initially, almost became a game for the Mac? Today we are going to be talking about easily one of the greatest plot twists of Silicon Valley: This is How Microsoft stole Halo from Apple.

It's probably hard to imagine that a game like Halo almost came into existence under the same umbrella as products like iMovie or iTunes. It almost seems like Apple would be the last company to put forward a whole new video game, especially one like this. But not only that, Apple is arguably responsible for making Halo even exist in the first place. This might seem like a lot of information to unpack, but when taking a critical look at the historical context of the era that Halo was developed in, this actually doesn’t seem all that farfetched. By the time the late 1990s came along, video games were at the peak of their popularity thanks to gaming consoles. Around 38% of U.S. households owned one. It was very clear that this wasn’t a fad or something that was going away anytime soon, but something did feel missing. Seemingly hiding in plain sight: where’s all the western developers? I mean, you have, Sony’s PlayStation, the SNES, Nintendo 64, the SEGA Dreamcast, just to name a few. But what is the common denominator here? All of these consoles are Japanese, and most of their games were also Japanese. At this time, all of the western developed games were seen in the PC community, where you have Doom, Quake, SimCity 2000, the Elder Scrolls, Diablo, and of course, who could forget Pajama Sam and PuttPutt. Western console video games were a dying art, and they needed to be resurrected if they wanted to continue working with the competition. Seeing all the tremendous success these Japanese consoles had, the Western World saw an opportunity to make a comeback; not all hope was lost, and that’s when Microsoft comes in.

Luckily, Microsoft wasn’t totally behind on all of this. The fact that Windows supported so many games is practically what made PC gaming a viable option, and this gave them a pretty good head start. You definitely couldn’t say the same about their direct competitor, Apple, as the Mac at this time ran virtually no games, at least not very popular ones. They did have games like Myth and Marathon that were successful, but that wasn’t enough, and Apple was aware of this. Apple even tried creating their own gaming console in 1996, which would be a disaster, but that’s a topic for another video. But Apple wasn’t ready to give up so easy. The iMac’s debut in 1998 saw incredible sales, bringing Apple back from the verge of bankruptcy and making it possible for them to be a competitor again. Steve Jobs thought that getting the new iMac more involved with gaming would make sales even better, and that’s what he sought out to do.

Okay, but what does this have anything to do with Halo? The reason you’re watching this. Well, the thing is, if Apple was going to compete with its rival gaming PCs, they couldn’t just make another game. They needed something good. Really good. A game that would have to be about just as innovative and original as the iMac itself. So, Apple got in touch with the company that had been making all of the games that were successful on the Macintosh: Bungie. The executive vice president of Bungie, Peter Tamte, had a former position at Apple and used that as leverage to get the attention of Steve Jobs to show that they were working on the ambitious game that the mac was looking for. And thus, Halo was born!

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