Steve Jobs is on stage, promising "one of the coolest [games] I've ever seen". He introduces Bungie co-founder Jason Jones, and his new game. "We're gonna see, for the first time, Halo." Perhaps you've seen this 1999 Macworld demo. If so, you know that it looks (and sounds) an awful lot like the Halo that would launch nearly two and a half years later. There's a soldier in green armour, and a jeep ride with a marine on the turret, all accompanied by the monkish chants of Martin O'Donnell's score.
OK, the character designs aren't quite there yet, the planet they're on is a little too bare – but there are two rather more important distinctions to note. One: the demo, as Jones announces before showing it off, "is being rendered in real-time, on a Macintosh". Two: the whole thing plays out in third-person. By the time of its launch in November 2001, Halo would undergo a serious transformation. But even before it reached this San Francisco stage, the game had changed an awful lot from where it began, with Jones and art director Marcus Lehto tinkering while the rest of Bungie worked on Myth II, the sequel to the studio's fantasy RTS.
