For some gamers, the year’s most interesting Halo title might not be Halo: Reach, the fifth entry in Microsoft’s vaunted line of first-person shooters. Fans of the series with a taste for retro games might prefer a Halo game made not for the Xbox 360 but for the 33-year-old Atari 2600 console.
Released at the Classic Gaming Expo in July, Halo 2600 is a two-dimensional demake that takes key elements of the official Halo games – the Master Chief character unloading bullets into rooms full of Covenant grunts – and compresses them down into a simpler gameplay formula.
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A tiny Master Chief wiggles his way around rectangular rooms, firing one bullet at a time, left and right, into a few scattered enemies. With 64 unique rooms and a variety of foes, it’s a bit more complicated than your average Atari game from the 1970s, but not by much.
Halo 2600 was designed by Ed Fries, the former head of Microsoft Game Studios and one of the key players in the launch of the Xbox and in Microsoft’s acquisition of Bungie Studios, the developer that created Halo. (Halo: Reach, released Tuesday, is Bungie’s final title in the series.)
Fries is a lifelong gamemaker with roots in classic consoles.
“Programming is a lot like poetry,” Fries says. “There’s meter and rhyme and all these restrictions around which words you can choose and where you can put them. Programming the Atari 2600 is like haiku.”
Classic gaming group Atari Age made a limited run of Halo 2600 cartridges that it hawked at Classic Gaming Expo. Though the cassettes sold out, Halo 2600 can be played in Flash form.
Halo 2600 might be called the ultimate fan project based on the popular videogame series, which began in 2001 and revolutionized the first-person shooter genre, spawning countless imitators and a loyal fan base. With its arresting mix of 8-bit characters and old-school gameplay, the retro game serves as a timely reminder of the aesthetic evolution of videogames, which have gone from simple, blocky imagery to cinematic visual wonders, thanks to the ever-increasing processing power of game consoles.