Bungie
6 HN mentions · mentioned in 5 months, 2017–2025
3:39 · 355K views · Jul 21, 2009
Footage of Bungie's Jason Jones revealing Halo to the public at Macworld on July 21, 1999. It shows the early third-person version of the game.
Cited as a historical reference that Halo was first announced at Macworld, with Steve Jobs involved, and nearly launched as a Mac game.
6 comments from Hacker News
First of all; the original acquisition is not what I was referring to, but rather: Microsoft's "maintenance" of the Halo IP after Bungie itself left Microsoft's domain, and the formation of a near-entirely new studio (343) to develop it. Ok, they didn't buy the IP at that juncture; they bought a studio to develop an IP they already owned. Use some creativity and you can see the parallels are similar enough. Second: Do you recall the keynote where Bungie unveiled Halo for the first time... at MacWorld 1999? For reference, Microsoft acquired Bungie in 2000. I've literally never heard the assertion that Halo was intended to be an RTS; my understanding is that it was originally going to be a third person FPS, as the 1999 MacWorld trailer suggests, but was changed to a first person FPS when Microsoft purchased them. this video
> The G4 Powermac came out in '99 "We are starting to see some great games come back to the Mac, but this is one of the coolest I've ever seen...this is the first time anybody has ever seen it, the first time they've debuted it...Halo is the name of this game, and we're going to see, for the first time: Halo." -Steve Jobs, MacWorld 1999 this video
> firing game devs by the thousands as they hand halo over to PlayStation They kind of took it from Apple to begin with. We almost had Halo on the iMac before Microsoft acquired Bungie [1]. [1] this video
You'd certainly be forgiven for thinking it was a Mac exclusive. You wouldn't think Steve Jobs would personally introduce a game that was multi-platform: this video
Believe it or not - it was actually meant to be an exclusive for Mac before Microsoft acquired it. Here’s Steve Jobs kicking off the demo in 1999: this video