Halo 2’s iconic E3 2003 demo, much of which did not appear in the final game when it launched a year later, will finally be playable next week via a Steam Workshop mod for Halo: The Master Chief Collection on PC, just in time for Halo 2’s 20th anniversary.
The mod will be available for free and will release November 9, the same day Halo 2 released in 2004. In the demo, Master Chief rides in a Pelican to the Earth city of New Mombasa, where he meets up with embattled UNSC Marines and battles his way through the city streets. After boarding and hijacking an enemy Ghost (a new gameplay feature added in Halo 2), Chief escapes from a pursuing Phantom dropship, only to find himself surrounded by Covenant drop pods filled with Energy Sword-wielding Elites. As he pulls out a plasma grenade, Cortana tells Chief “Bet you can’t stick it,” to which Chief replies, “You’re on” before throwing himself at the Elites as the screen fades to white. All the while Martin O’Donnell’s instantly recognizable score plays.
It made a powerful impression back in the day. In an Xbox Wire blog post, Halo community director Brian Jarrard, who previously worked at Halo 2 developer Bungie, said the stakes and energy going into E3 2003 were off the charts.
“The response to the demo at E3 was electric, and nearly every Halo fan remembers that demo and where they were when they were first blinded by its majesty,” Jarrard said. “Best of all, none of us ever would have expected that 20 plus years later, a group of passionate community modders would bring this demo to life as a full-fledged mission.”
But making the demo fully playable wasn’t easy. As noted in the blog, the original demo was built on a version of the Halo engine that no longer exists and isn’t compatible with other versions of Halo 2. Halo senior franchise writer Kenneth Peters said the original build of the demo required an original Xbox developer kit to boot, something “in increasingly short supply even within the studio.”
The work to bring the demo back to life was previously announced in a Halo Waypoint blog from 2022, where first details on how developer 343 Industries (now rebranded to Halo Studios) and a group of community modders referred to as the Digsite team were working on restoring old cut content from Halo and Halo 2, including the E3 2003 demo. At the time, 343 made no promises the demo would ever become fully playable.
One Digsite member said some aspects of the demo were just smoke and mirrors, with the team having to make some aspects of the demo “real” by using assets from the shipped version of Halo 2. The demo, Peters said, was never made to be played off-script without breaking. That presented a unique challenge, including having to make sense of “barely documented” code “originally written under an insane time crunch” 20 years ago.
“This was NOT a trivial process, and we should probably layer on a whole page of caveats that come with taking a demo map for an engine that no longer exists and getting it to not blow up the current lightmapper (among other issues that come from letting people go into areas that were never intended to be seen).”
The Halo 2 E3 2003 demo isn’t the only way Halo Studios is celebrating Halo 2’s 20th anniversary. A special Halo 2 playlist in Halo Infinite, featuring Halo 2 maps remade in Forge and gameplay changes made to mimic the 2004 shooter, will go live November 5.