A Halo 2 Tournament - 20 years later.
A week or so ago from November 8 to 10 in the year 2024 a Halo 2 tournament took place. This was very interesting for a few reasons.
- Halo 2 was released November 9, 2004 - this was exactly 20 years later.
- Halo 2 is my favorite video game of all time.
- The tournament was played on original Xbox consoles.
- The tournament was played on original Halo 2 + a bit of Insignia patching.
- The tournament was played with original CRT TV's.
- The tournament had Chris Puckett returning as host.
For those who got to experience the release of Halo and Halo 2 - I'm sure you remember how revolutionary this game was. This game practically invented online competitive matchmaking with voice chat to unite the teams in drama.
Halo MCC Revisited
Halo MCC launched November 11, 2014. Some would argue it wasn't a working game until August 27, 2018. We take a look into why.
Sure there is Halo 2 on the Master Chief Collection, but as I blogged about 6 years ago that game was launched terribly. Only after 1,200~ days passed did the game finally act stable, but at the cost of not really feeling like the original Halo 2. So my hopes of a return of competitive Halo 2 faded away.
Halo 2 & Insignia
The original Halo 2 and Xbox Live is reborn thanks to the Insignia project.
Earlier this year though, Insignia launched with support for Halo 2 and offered an original Xbox experience. I was blown away with how well this software worked. I setup my Insignia account through the regular Xbox Live interface from two decades ago and started playing Halo 2 on my original Xbox with a few hundred other people. Hearing news from the faces behind Insignia that stats were being kept - it just made sense that a tournament was near.
Sure enough a few months later news about a Halo 2 tournament came across my socials and I was ready. Unfortunately a few moments later I realized the weekend it fell on did not work for my schedule. So instead I prepared a $501 donation to grow the prize pool from what I would have probably spent on a flight/lodging.
As the days neared and I joined the Discord for the event I learned the names behind this tournament was:
It wasn't names I recognized personally, but I was excited to see this major team effort from folks all over to make this event real. What I was ultimately curious about was the logistics of hundreds of original Xbox consoles and CRT's and how these would end up being configured, patched, shipped and configured for a weekend. This isn't a huge business putting on a tournament so where this stuff was sourced from just piqued my curiosity.
As the tournament got closer the stream sources were announced. This time it solidified that Chris Puckett who was the face of MLG (Major League Gaming) tournaments decades ago would reprise the role. Of course Puckett didn't stop with Halo and has continued to take video game broadcasting to a new level, but this was big to me. This was the voice that people heard as Halo grew from each event. It was more than likely the voice people heard as some of the original winners took tournament after tournament long ago.
Photos from the early MLG events from LoadingWharf172
Of course with teams in the past like Final Boss, Carbon, Instinct and Str8 Rippin - I wondered which teams would dust off 20 years of rust and revisit the game. Would we see the OGRE twins make an appearance? News was some retired professionals would attend, but the exact list remained a mystery a few days out.
As the days counted down we even saw some hints that Insignia was running on all the Xbox consoles capturing game stats. I was hopeful that we'd have stats to review all the data of the event before the event even started. I'm personally obsessed with Halo stats ever since experiencing bungie.net eons ago. This was a video game that launched 20 years ago that included live web game stats. That's sometimes unheard of with releases of today's games which sometimes launch with no web component.
That decades ago pushed me into building a stat site for every single Halo game, which presently is Leaf - a stat site for Halo Infinite.
With under one day to go a little trailer montage went up by All-in-JUAN and it set the stage. This was going to be a major nostalgic trip to the past.
Sure enough taking 20 years of enhancements to technology for live-streaming, audio, visuals and more while playing an original game on original equipment was a sight to see. I can't fathom the effort it took to take technology of the past and stabilize it for technology of today to enable the viewing experience we got.
The photo above helps explain the situation the easiest. CRT TV's with a modern setup with a loaded roster of retired Halo legends. It was simply unbelievable watching legends of the past compete at a high level against folks that have kept playing Halo 2 for the better part of the last decade.
As the night fell on Saturday this was quite an event to remotely witness with a couple thousand people growing a prize pool every hour. As the prize pool passed $80,000 I felt an urge to donate again.
It was a bit odd to donate online as it only took Coinbase, but I figured I was sitting on crypto for a decade doing nothing I could afford to send some bitcoin for a good cause. For those who can't fathom donating $1,002 to some tournament I figured I would spend that much traveling there if I did and I owed this game a lot as Halo 2 helped drive my career trajectory.
It was pretty cool to see my 2nd donation ending up on screen at the same time as Roy getting a triple, which then made its way on Twitter. This was just one of probably hundreds of moment's over the weekend that were clip worthy. If you don't have 20-30 hours to kill re-watching the VODs - you can watch this 6 minute supercut by OozyGorilla.
As Sunday arrived it was championship Sunday – when generally you just have the winners finals, loser finals and then the grand finals.
The bracket above showed how things broke down and a few call outs:
- Oats Overnight vs Final Instinct (Winners Quarters) was legends vs legends.
- Zanada vs Final Instinct (Winners Semis) was a great series.
- Oats Overnight vs Zanada (Losers Semis) was amazing.
- Zanada vs Final Instinct (Losers Finals) was absolutely insane to watch.
- LVT 3-0'd every team in their path.
These games were absolutely nostalgic to watch as players warmed up to the game they competed in decades ago.
Take this clip of StrongSide getting an insane double kill - it was crazy to see him compete like it was just yesterday.
Or this clip of Final Instinct pulling a flag with 1 second left in a crazy pile of bodies to score the tying flag. This felt like Halo and crazy enough this game and older equipment never seemed to have an issue.
Let me stress that watching modern HCS (Halo Esports) you just naturally accept and deal with constant game crashes, pauses and equipment swaps. This was a tournament that ended up going crash free on a 20 year old game & console. Is this because Halo 2 just had to contend with one type of platform that was constant?
Can confirm we had zero crashes the entire tournament. Even in the pit.
Was a pain to set up all the equipment but damn well worth it.
- Voodewman
Or was this because Bungie the studio had immense stress for 18 months to deliver a perfect game. Making reasons why modern Halo crashes constantly wouldn't be fun to dive into, but maybe a large reason is what pushed 343 (Halo Studios) to leave their home-grown game engine and instead move to Unreal Engine. It's probably tough being both a game engine company and a video game company as the ecosystem evolves with consoles & computers.
So as the legends fell one by one to teams still playing Halo 2 - we arrived at the grand finals with LVT vs Zanada. The LVT team looked like a subset of the Halo 2 Real Ones - a group of folks that continue to play Halo 2.
LVT, the brand, continues to support Halo in every single possible way. We had two streams the entire tournament between Puckett (Main) and LVT (Feature) where some of the games in the pit were being covered. Halo is lucky to have LVT who try and cover all competitive Halo games no matter the tournament.
With the stage set and rosters facing each other. LVT continued its dominance and put a 3-0 victory in the grand finals. With that the event came to a close and the winners remained.
- 1st - Stormy v2
- 2nd - GuN ShoT
- 3rd - Moniz
- 1st - LVT (GuN ShoT, Havok, Stormy v2, c0n)
- 2nd - Zanada (Moniz, Zildj, DoRdY, CrAzYv2)
- 3rd - Final Instinct (Walshy, StrongSide, Lunchbox, Roy)
- 1st - Team Col (Kaiser, Cobbyt)
- 2nd - VGA Legendz (Mack, C6 Jordy)
- 3rd - Team Canada (Silos, Vinny Mendoza)
So after a good nostalgic trip to the past I am debating growing my collection of Halo posters.
All purchased from Nerd Herd Printing
While I debate purchasing more posters - if you missed the event. You can catch up on the recorded videos here: