Over 25 years of Halo content has been leaked online, including playable builds from before the iconic first-person shooter series joined Xbox or even became an FPS.
The leaked content appears to come from Halo Studios’ collaboration with fan modders, which aims to restore cut content from past Halo titles, including the Halo 2 E3 2003 demo released last month.
Mod team Digsite has been working with 343 since last summer to restore content, including multiplayer maps originally developed for the PC port of Halo Combat Evolved, as well as cutting content from classic Halo games, without pay.
Perhaps most importantly, the long-forgotten 1999 Macworld demo was planned to be restored for Halo: The Master Chief Collection. Before its release on Microsoft’s first Xbox, Halo was planned to be a Mac-exclusive third-person version.
However, this week’s leak makes the 1999 demo fully playable on PC, along with nearly 100GB of other files containing unfinished and cut content from the original Halo game developed by Bungie.
On Thursday, a former member of the Digsite mod team confirmed the legitimacy of the leaked content, but insisted that none of the current or former members were responsible.
“Neither I nor any of the recent Digsite starters have done anything like this,” they wrote. “For your information, me and some of the recently departed people actually couldn’t access some files, such as debug dlls. This happened and uh, Merry Christmas guys”.
Another former Digsite member commented on the leak, claiming that most of the mod team had recently quit due to disputes over the team’s salary and lack of resources.
“I and the rest of the team responsible for Crash Site, e3, Alpha Moon, and most of the h1\h2 content quit because it became clear that (the E3 2003 demo) was more successful than Microsoft expected. (ed) We are still working to deliver another release at zero cost or zero resources.”
Microsoft recently rebranded 343 Industries as ‘Halo Studios’ and confirmed that it is working on several games developed with Unreal Engine 5.
The news was announced during the Halo World Championship and was accompanied by a video showing technical testing of various Halo-themed locations running in UE5.
Some Affinity was part of the work developing what the studio’s former design director, Mike Clopper, recently claimed was a ‘game-changing’ battle royale mode for Halo Infinite.
