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Microsoft had built up quite a reputation in the video game space by the year 2000, even only as a publisher. But its impact was limited to Windows-backed (and Microsoft-owned) personal computers, and when Sony announced their CD-ROM and DVD-capable PlayStation 2, there were fears at Microsoft that the Japanese company—already dominating the home console landscape—would begin to threaten the PC market as well. With video games already generating about $43 billion dollars in revenue, it was decided that Microsoft would fight fire with fire, and about a year after the PS2's release came the Xbox—the tech giant's debut home console.

Marketed around its PC-like design philosophy (including the first home console to contain a hard disk drive) and geared towards an American audience, there were plenty of technical reasons to take a chance on the Xbox. But if you're going to buy a console, you need something to play on it first. Luckily for them, they acquired developer Bungie in early 2000 and, transitively, Halo—one of the most iconic "killer app" games ever made.

Halo—or, to use its official title, Halo: Combat Evolved—is a sci-fi first-person shooter set in the 26th century, where you play as...well, you already know all this. It's one of the most popular gaming series of all time, and it was a massive success for the fledgling Xbox, sporting an incredible attach rate in the console's debut year. Its appeal to a large market is immediately identifiable: an epic battle upon an alien ring-world against cultist tribes and an all-consuming parasite. To a certain demographic, its premise almost sells itself, but it should be praised more specifically for its ingenuity.

Far-future FPS games like Halo were not exactly common in 2001, especially on home consoles. And it innovated in far more than just its setting; Halo still controls like a dream, being one of the first to utilize the typical twin-stick FPS controls that have become standardized today. To go from playing, say, Perfect Dark or Timesplitters to playing Halo is a massive leap in controller fidelity, and it really makes this decades-old game retain its "next generation" feel. The timeless visual style helps as well, and Halo also comes packed with one of gaming's most memorable soundtracks.

Its campaign jumps right out of the gate with its first couple of attention-grabbing missions, and crash-landing on Halo for the first time is still a fantastic set piece. These first few missions are where Halo is at its best; the game is playing with a massive scope, and having such a sandbox world serve as the setting for a campaign mission was revolutionary at the time. It makes sense, then, that as Halo's missions get more limited in space, they also become less impressive.

In truth, most of the game's second half feels pretty routine; most missions involve cut-and-paste room layouts where the only thing that differs is which enemies you'll be encountering. The game's enemy AI is pretty impressive, but it's not strong enough to carry room after room of what will quickly feel like the same fight. This feeling of déjà vu is only exacerbated in many of the later levels that reuse layouts not just from their own mission, but from previous ones as well.

Aside from perhaps The Library—a mission where Halo blends the line between sci-fi and horror—this makes most of the campaign feel pretty unengaging. Halo's whole premise is, as was mentioned earlier, to be an epic space battle, so to become so tedious for so much of its single-player runtime is a somewhat serious crime. Sure, its repetition is likely due to hardware limitations, but it's hard to shake the feeling that you've gotten almost all you can out of Halo less than halfway through its story. Thankfully, it does allow for two players to take on the campaign in co-op mode, and this can add a fair degree of enjoyment to the game's more monotonous sections. It also absolutely thrives in local multiplayer, and while it preceded Xbox Live, it's still tremendously fun in split-screen—and it proved a similarly successful concept on PCs.

If you were to make a list of genre-defining games, Halo: Combat Evolved would likely be somewhere at the top. A list of most important series debuts? Yup. Most nostalgic, most console-defining, most memorable? Halo, Halo, Halo. It is undoubtedly one of the most iconic games ever made, and even with its frequently glacial pace and seemingly endless repetition, it's a game that anyone with even a passing interest in video game history should probably experience.

It's not that far-fetched to say that without Halo, Microsoft might not even be in the home console market today. That it can even be claimed that a single game has had that much of an impact is a testament to Halo's legacy. It will always be a game that is worth grabbing a friend and blasting through—and by doing so, appreciating both how much it innovated and how much the series would innovate from here.

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