Bungie Ponders Remaking The First Two Halos

Would Bungie ever consider remaking Halo: Combat Evolved and Halo 2 using more modern graphics technology? Let’s find out.

Taking our cue from a question posed by Kotaku reader Aliasalpha, we asked Bungie’s Curtis Creamer, producer of Halo 3: ODST if they would ever remake the earlier Halo games.

Surprisingly, Creamer admits the idea is not something Bungie has ever talked about internally. He said it might be an interesting thing to try at some point, but as a team right now they are more focused on looking at new things they can do.

“ODST is a great example of that,” says Creamer. “In some ways it is going back to some of the gameplay styles from Halo 1, like for example bringing back the health and stamina mechanic… But it’s more exciting for us because we are doing it with a new character, we’re doing it in a little bit of a new setting, and on top of that we’re adding a new way to try to tell the story. That’s more exciting for us than going back and recreating something that’s already been done.”

So I asked Creamer to speculate for me. Hypothetically speaking, just how much work would be involved in a full Halo 1 remake using the Halo 3 engine?

It would not be a simple undertaking, he explained. Between every Halo game, Bungie has made massive updates to the underlying technology that it would be impossible to simply re-import the Halo 1 levels into the Halo 3 engine.

There’s also the element of how fans might react to a remake that wasn’t 100% faithful.

“One of the things about trying to do something like that would be that you don’t have any latitude,” says Creamer. “You’re trying to make something that already exists so there’s no space in which to move. Is it easier to paint an exact portrait of something standing in front of you or of whatever just happens to be in your mind at that time?

“It happens all the time when we do remakes for some of the multiplayer maps. There’s always a lot of people who get super upset that there’s that one vert that’s not in the exact right spot… and that [whiney voice]completely ruins gameplay on the map!”

So, as nice an idea as a Halo remake might sound in theory, it doesn’t look like it’s going to be something we’ll see any time soon. Besides, it’s not as if Halo and Halo 2 really need remaking just yet; they’re both still perfectly playable and not too unattractive today.

Have there really been that many great remakes anyway?

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