LET me set the scene: it’s the mid-2000s and I’m in still primary school. My Blink 182-loving older brother just brought home a copy of Halo: Combat Evolved which he’d bought with his friend. We eject The Simpsons: Hit & Run and shove Halo into the rickety original Xbox disk tray. The iconic choral music for which the Halo franchise is known kicks in as the game boots up, and hundreds of subsequent hours are spent in our living room bickering, laughing and yelling over this sci-fi first-person shooter.
The first Halo is one of the most important games for the genre, and the industry as a whole. The word ‘innovation’ is tossed around far too much, but it certainly applies here. Bungie’s 2000 smash hit was a revolution in gaming with an original orchestral score, full voice acting and a greater emphasis on characters and worldbuilding than had been seen before in a shooter. Halo’s campaign, if a little short by modern standards, has aged incredibly well in terms of narrative sophistication mixed with satisfying gameplay elements.
The story follows Master Chief, Cortana, Johnson and others in their struggle on the alien construct known as ‘Halo’ and is greatly enhanced by both the music and challenging shooting mechanics. Halo showed that there was an appetite for virtual violence and intriguing sci-fi stories in tandem.
Its multiplayer, for me, has more of a nostalgic element. Myself, my brother and his friends spent countless sessions playing all-time great maps such as Blood Gulch, laughing as we stepped out of a teleporter straight into someone’s randomly-fired rocket. Halo’s floaty controls and vehicle combat unmatchable by the standards of the time and allowed both casual and competitive players to love it in equal measures. Halo, inarguably, fuelled my love for video games through its perfect blend of narrative stories and multiplayer sofa-side laughs.
Edd Church
Skyrim wasn’t, to be honest, my first video game. I’d put quite a few toes in the water before, trying out Counter Strike and Portal 2, and even a brief embarrassing experiment with Runescape. However, the fifth Elder Scrolls game managed to grip me not due to the glitchy yet oddly stunning graphics, nor the rather blasé storyline, but because it was the first game I’d tried that gave me the illusion of full control.
I didn’t have full control of course, the glitches and half-a-horse-dropping-dead bugs had far more control over me than I had over them. I’d played the main storyline through in one round, but to my surprise my character was still standing there, patiently waiting for the hundreds of hours I could potentially sink into his scaly self. And it was escapism, to be honest; I’d come back from long days in school only to go on the game and become a gaunt high elf trying to rid the world of (insert hero storyline), or perhaps play as feline Oriental stereotype Khajit and crawl around the underbelly of a sketchy river city. Whilst I was sat with my feet propped up, crisps strewn across the table, and my textbooks forgotten.
It wasn’t just the character design, it was the sheer amount of opportunity: I felt like I could do literally anything – go on a drunken rampage and attempt to fix my mistakes, or fly about the world thanks to a Daedric prince. This all does sound really quite basic, of course; but keep in mind I was a 14-year-old, incredibly girly-girl convinced that Harry Potter was for her and video games were for boys. I remain, however, the same 22-year girly-girl fingers deep in Battle for Azeroth and adamantly sticking to fantasy role playing games; but Skyrim and the still dazzling concept of a completely open world was truly a mundane yet enthralling beginning.
Neha Shaji
