Some items have turned up that are from the original Halo, which initially went towards a highly different genre.

The mod team at Digsite has been given a helping hand in restoring old, deleted Halo content. They’ve been working with 343 Industries for the last year, and since this studio has been working on the Halo IP for the last decade (whether or not they’ve been good at it is subjective), they’ve received a lot of help. (Granted, they weren’t the ones behind the content in question, Bungie was…)

Design, production documents, Bungie’s feedback notes, tags, compiled maps, and source data are of interest to Digsite if they relate to multiplayer maps that we haven’t seen before. Among the recovered content, the multiplayer maps intended initially for the PC port of Halo: Combat Evolved are worth mentioning. (Gearbox Software was behind the port, released in 2003.) Ludus, a Digsite contributor, says that Gearbox made a lot of new textures that were never used, and he thinks it would be sad if they remained unused, so he has remixed Indoor into a new map that makes better use of the newly found bitmaps.

Halo: The Master Chief Collection will also be bolstered with a demo long thought lost. It’s about what we saw at Macworld 1999 (because, yes, Bungie was originally closer to Apple, and Marathon was released for Mac in 1994). Let’s not forget that before Halo was an Xbox-exclusive first-person shooter franchise, Bungie planned to make Halo a third-person Mac-exclusive. According to Digsite, it took some work before they could make it work in Halo: Master Chief Collection and set it up as a sandbox for us to play in, explore, or even use for our mods.

Vehicles and enemy types from the Halo RTS origin will also be appearing, which is a significant moment in the preservation of the game, and there are reportedly more exciting things to look forward to. If Halo Infinite didn’t work out how Microsoft wanted it to, at least let’s be successful here…

Source: VGC