Halo 3’s Loading Screen
The difference between the Golden Era of video games, and whatever you call the current era, is embodied in the difference between loading screens.
Fortunately/unfortunately, I did not have Xbox Live in my early teens through my twenties. Getting an Xbox was a miracle, as my parents just did not comprehend how or why video games were popular, with Pong as their only real exposure. It was almost certainly for the better – in my adulthood I get so frustrated that I involuntarily blurt out all the classics and slam my controller down when I decide “this game is such bullshit.” I’ve even rage-quit a few times when I really felt as though the game was suspect (I’m still not convinced every game is clean). There’s no doubt that a 14-year-old me would have wasted a lot of my life playing “just one more game,” and would have thrown fits if I died one too many times. I have trouble with that now, at age 30.
My game of choice is Halo. I really believe it is “the perfect game.” It is easy to learn, difficult to master, the campaigns are all fun and emotional, the storytelling is good, the music has been matched but never surpassed, and, although I did not have Xbox Live back in the day, I did go to a few LAN parties and play online at the houses of friends who did have Live. It was, no pun intended, a blast.
Over the last few years, I’ve delved deeper into the Halo and greater video game community, and a common theme you might find in these corners of the internet, and YouTube, is that “the good ol’ days are gone.” There’s usually some variation of a YouTube comment that goes like:
“School just finished for the week. You and your friends sprint home and immediately sign on to Xbox Live and play Halo 3. You ordered pizza and a few two-liters of Mountain Dew Code Red. You and one friend both get in the Warthog and try to get the flag back to base, while another picks off people with his sniper from afar, until you finally fall asleep in the early hours of the morning. You don’t know it, but it will never get any better than this.”
I’ve noticed it's not just video games though. A topic for another time: the “Golden Age” of TV is almost certainly past us – The Sopranos, The Wire, Breaking Bad, have yet to be surpassed by virtually all TV shows released in the years since Breaking Bad’s finale. The golden age being gone doesn’t mean there haven’t been great shows or episodes, but they are so few and far between that they can’t be considered part of that era. Although it’s a children’s show, I, and many others on the internet, consider Avatar: The Last Airbender to be the last great animated show. Movies are similar, although their golden age was much, much earlier. But I, for one, believe the last classic films were the three Lord of the Rings. I’m not saying there aren’t great directors making great movies, but many movies that I enjoyed fall into the realm of low budget “art house” or “independent” films (think “Get Out” or “A Quiet Place”).
A healthy portion of the internet believes gaming (whatever that means) peaked sometime around the release of Halo 3. I can’t find a certain end to the peak – how can you when Esports rake in millions of dollars and player counts for games like Fortnite, PUBG, and Overwatch are so high – but the general sentiment among my age cohort is that “kids today” don’t get just how good it was when Halo 3 came out. The old man in me looks at the gameplay and skyboxes of new video games, with ultra-bright colors, uber-cartoonish characters, and I often have trouble following what’s on screen or what the point is, with the amount of information constantly coming at you. Is it even fun?
As I said, I wasn’t completely engrossed in the fervor of Xbox Live, so I unfortunately missed out on some of the excitement, but I did play Halo 2 and Halo 3 when they came out. One thing, especially about Halo 3, is this sense of tragedy that seems to permeate the entire experience, all the way down to the menu and loading screens. I first noticed this in the Halo 2 campaign level Gravemind – you’re in the home world of your enemy, a juggernaut collection of species bent on wiping out humans, and their “holy city” is an entire entity that can travel through space at lightspeed. There’s an outdoor section, and the music subverts expectations – amidst the violence and bloodshed unavoidable in a shooter game centered around blasting through aliens, a chorus of female voices sings over ambient sounds that seem to echo throughout the whole environment. The soprano voice peaks and evokes a sense that this once-great empire, though technologically advanced, is actually in decay, and has finally broken (a civil war among the aliens breaks out during this level). Their own glory days are behind them, and man, blasting away aliens in that environment with that soundtrack just hits different. You almost (almost) feel bad.
It's bizarre that this feeling, closing in on sadness, gave the original Halos their X-Factor. They have this tragic sense, but it’s also beautiful. I suppose it’s similar to hearing a song that brings you back to a time with a loved one or a road trip or period of time, but I think that taking part in the video game makes the feelings hit deeper. I first felt it when I was 5 or 6 on the Mario Kart 64 track Rainbow Road. There was something about the fact that there was just this racetrack, this beautiful rainbow surface in the middle of space, with light-up graphics of Nintendo characters in the sky, and its inhabitants were just…racing go karts. Add a perfect soundtrack behind it, and you have the true feeling of no consequences, no responsibilities, just the simplicity of driving around the track as fast as you can.
In my mid-twenties, a former roommate and I had our Sunday and Monday ritual from September through February. On Sunday, I would sleep off a hangover from the night before (possibly after a date), lounge around a little, and go on my long run. My roommate would turn on football games and have them on all day, and I later realized that this was something my parents did growing up as well. That night, we would watch the first half of the Sunday night game, play the first two cups of the grand prix at halftime, watch the second half, then play the second two cups. On Rainbow Road, the last race, we’d turn off all the lights in the apartment, and the unspoken agreement was that the winner tidied up the living room. Repeat on Monday, but it would be after the awful first day of the workweek, and for me, running outside in Central Park at that time usually consisted of freezing temperatures. The comfort of football and Mario Kart was a comfort I hadn’t felt since I was a child. It was one of the best stretches of my life.
I always got that feeling when I played Halo – a bunch of faceless soldiers killing each other in gruesome ways, but with no consequence. Maybe it was in a vast canyon, or in a strange structure, or on an alien ship. In contrast to Halo’s epic storytelling (at least in the original trilogy), there’s nothing simpler than a bunch of people shooting at each other, for no reason other than they are on a different team.
I’m one of the few who actually enjoys playing Halo Infinite, but my main gripe with it isn’t the mediocre story, or the desync, or the weird store (which I haven’t spent a cent on). It just feels like it’s trying to be cool. Compare this Halo Infinite loading screen, to this Halo 3 loading graphic. There’s nothing wrong with the first, it’s just not cool. But the second – how beautiful, like it’s ancient and modern at the same time. The maps of the original trilogy (and in Reach as well) often brought this sense of sad wonder. In addition to the widely criticized lack of maps in Halo Infinite: would it kill them to make a map where you actually see the Halo ring when you’re clearly on a Halo ring?
How could a game with somber music, loading screens that depict an empire long extinct, and skyboxes that can give a sense of almost existential dread, be fun? It shouldn’t have worked, but it did. The opinion of the greater community is that the current leadership at 343 Industries (who took over the Halo franchise from the original creators at Bungie) didn’t and doesn’t understand what made Halo, Halo. It’s as obvious as ever in this clip of Bonnie Ross at E3 (I think) and she says, “Epic worlds, epic battles, epic scale.” (This whole video is worth watching).
Her delivery of that line, and the line itself, is everything Halo isn’t. And it’s the embodiment of what video games have become: lazy cash grabs from children with their parents’ credit cards, reliance on existing IP, stretch it out using seasons and game passes, throw in cross-media crossovers, celebrity streams, celebrity appearances.
Video games used to be naming Halo “Halo” even though the suits at Microsoft thought it was too girly. They were Call of Duty showing a map of the world on the main menu, with lights indicating where everyone online was. They were the endless oceans outside the bounds of the playable map, that begged you to explore them, even though you knew you couldn’t. They didn’t have to tell you about the epic worlds, epic battles, and epic scale. They showed you. Beauty is cool. And it goes all the way down to the loading screen.