MONOCULTURE: Why Halo 3's Hype Can Never Happen Again

I consider myself an optimistic Halo fan. For the uninitiated, that means I'm going against the grain. The usual opinion is that Halo fell off after 343 Industries took over and Bungie retired from working on the Halo series. And while 343 has seen its fair share of growing pains adjusting to working on the series, I do think they've more or less hit their stride, though nothing they've made is perfect, just as nothing Bungie made was perfect.

Many people look back at the hype behind Halo 2 and 3 as reference points, saying that the lack of hype behind some of 343's newer projects is proof that they could never create a product as beloved as Halo 3. And while I can see some reason behind a statement like that, I instead want to look at the more likely reason: The death of monoculture.

Now, I wanna preface by saying that I was a bump on a belly in mid-2007. I won't play you for a fool and act like I witnessed the hype leading up to Halo 3 firsthand. But even one Google search makes it perfectly clear how inescapable this videogame was. Halo 3 Slurpees, Halo 3 Burger King promos, Halo 3 action figures, Halo 3 Special Edition Xbox 360s, Halo 3 Pontiac promotions, Halo 3 commercials on primetime television, a fucking HALO 3 NASCAR. Even if you'd never even picked up a videogame controller in your life in 2007, you knew the big green guy. There was no social media in the same vein as today, with Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter. Of course, there wasn't zero social media, but it just didn't hold the same kind of advertisement carrying power it does now. But that only meant that, with enough money, Microsoft could put Halo 3 in front of everyone.

Today, that is just impossible. You can pay to run a commercial of your videogame on YouTube ads, but they can be blocked. The algorithm may never even recommend the advertisement to a large subset of people. And more importantly: Social media platforms are engineered to show you what you want to see. If you don't care about shooter video games, why would a platform push advertisements for a shooter video game to you? It seems counterintuitive for the company doing the advertising, and that's because it kinda is. You're only really getting your product out to people who would already buy it, which means your growth is stunted. And in that same motion, you aren't getting that momentous reach that Halo 3 got with all its promotion.

Now, erase Halo 3 from the equation and substitute anything you like that is a little dated for it. The same thing applies. Twenty years ago, once something was in the public eye, it carried. People talked about it, more folks learned of it, and the hype only grew. Nowadays, the only people buying a numbered entry in a videogame franchise are people who have been playing said franchise for years. And often, they're critiquing and tearing apart that game before it even releases, because they expect perfection. There are many cases where a franchise did genuinely just fall off. (How's it hanging, Call of Duty.) But I truly do not believe Halo is one of those franchises. Bungie ended off strong with Reach, even if it's multiplayer wasn't perfect. 343 started off on a stumble with Halo 4, but its campaign gameplay and characterization was still good, even if the plot itself felt weak. Same with Halo 5. Even if its characters weren't handled perfectly and the plot was weak, I found myself enjoying those characters, and there's no denying the multiplayer was amazing. Halo Infinite had a fun campaign with a good plot that felt like returning to the series' roots with a breath of fresh air in its open-world gameplay, and the multiplayer felt very fun while being bogged down by the sadly all too common live service practices and aggressive monetization. But none of this "ruined" Halo. If anything, what """ruined""" Halo was a perfect storm: The immediate (deserved) bad press of the Xbox One, the dud everyone saw Halo 4 as, and a general shift in the gaming landscape going into the latter half of the 2010s.

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Now, setting the "enlightened gamer" bit aside for a minute, I'm gonna talk to you eye-to-eye. Halo never died. It was never ruined. 343 did not butcher your beloved shooter franchise. In fact, there's no bad Halo game at all. There is "This isn't the same as Halo 3" and then there's "This is a bad video game". It's perfectly fine to wish the series would hit its perceived peak again like with Halo 3. But when every single new entry is held up against an aging trilogy of games to knock off points every time it dares to do something new or different, you'll only set yourself up for misery. And worse than that, when it's the loudest majority doing that complaining, it causes the developers of the series to lose sight on what the current players want from the series. People who haven't bought a Halo game in 13 years often end up being the most vocal critiques of the series, and often in misguided ways. I'm not advocating for blindly supporting and loving every aspect of every Halo game. But the next time I have to hear "They didn't do it like this when Bungie was making it", I might die.