Simultaneous Release
Xbox and Halo both turn 25 next Sunday. Halo was first shown to the world by Steve Jobs, as a Mac game. This summer it came out on PlayStation.
On July 21, 1999, at Macworld in New York, Steve Jobs gave part of his keynote to a small Chicago studio called Bungie, so it could show its next game. The game was called Halo. Jobs announced it would come out on the Mac and on Windows at the same time. The Gregorian-chant theme people still hum was written for that keynote: Martin O'Donnell recorded it in Chicago and sent it to New York the same night he finished it.
Bungie made sense on that stage. It was a Mac studio. Its 1994 shooter Marathon was the Mac's answer to Doom, and when Bungie said it would port Marathon 2 to Windows, Mac players sent it a flood of angry mail.
Then the money ran out. A bug in Myth II deleted the contents of the folder you installed it in. Bungie found out after 200,000 copies had been made, recalled them, and lost $800,000. On June 19, 2000, eleven months after the keynote, Microsoft announced it had bought Bungie. Halo became the launch game for a console nobody had seen yet, the Xbox.
Both came out on November 15, 2001. In the first two months, Halo sold alongside more than half of all the Xboxes sold. It was the reason to own one. The Windows version arrived in September 2003. The Mac version came out on December 11, 2003, two years after the Xbox one (it's all on the game's Wikipedia page).
Bungie left Microsoft in 2007, and Microsoft kept Halo. In July 2022 Sony bought Bungie for $3.6 billion. And on July 28 this year, Halo: Campaign Evolved, a remake of the first game's campaign made for the 25th anniversary, came out on PlayStation 5 on the same day as Xbox and PC. It's the first Halo ever released on a Sony console. A lot of the gaming press read it as Microsoft calling the console war over.
Xbox and Halo both turn 25 next Sunday, and Microsoft is adding old Xbox games to Game Pass all week (Pure Xbox has the list). Bungie, for its part, brought back Marathon in March, the first new one since 1996. It's out on PlayStation 5, Xbox and Windows. Not on the Mac.