I’m an unabashed fan of the Halo series. This isn’t to say that I care at all for the mythos of Bungie’s universe or even its Spartan hero, but rather that I firmly believe in the validity of the first game’s subtitle: “combat evolved.” Like most console gamers my age, I spent countless hours playing Goldeneye against my middle school friends on the N64. PC gamers had Valve’s games to feed their need to shoot each other, but we console gamers felt a distinct lack in the wake of Goldeneye. What did we play instead? Fighting and cart-racing games, of all things. Awful.
In fact, I quit playing games during the summer before my last year of high school. By the time I left for college, they were completely out of my system. I was one of the few kids who didn’t bring a console to the dorms. I actually read books during my free time that first semester. One evening, on the way to the shower (in my pink flip flops and boxer shorts), I passed a dark, open room reeking of stale sweat and passed gas. I could hear two things: the constant popping noise of a gun followed by shouts of delight and muffled curses. I peeked inside the room to glimpse a tiny television screen split in four. Each partition of the screen was zoomed in on the face of a ridiculously-colored and -named space marine, a tiny red dot in the middle sparking with each press of the trigger.
The level was called Hang Em High. The weapon of choice, a pistol... with an invisible zoom lens.
Everyone knows what happened to the pistol. In the years that followed, Microsoft created XBOX Live, while Bungie poured thousands of dollars and hours into iterating a tripartite combat system. Tracking the density of kills across a number of maps and countless networked matches, Bungie balanced the risk and reward of choosing between one strong weapon with grenades, dual-wielding smaller ballistic and plasma pistols, and the signature vehicles of the series. Combat, you see, had evolved past the dominant strategy of zooming pistols.
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