That’s almost an entire PlayStation 5 Blu-ray disc, and it’s full of developer builds, internal documents, assets, and unreleased content from Bungie’s original trilogy…

On December 25th (when else?), a bunch of developer material called the Halo Digsite Archive was leaked on 4chan, and you’ll find a lot of stuff from 1998 to 2024. The leaked content is likely related to the Halo Digsite project, when 343 Industries (now Halo Studios) began working with community modders to restore content that had been cut from older Halo games. The leaked content includes the E3 2000 build, which was used to create the trailer for the original Xbox version, even though it was incompatible with the console.

The internal documents for the original trilogy include detailed mission overviews, descriptions, and environment design documents. The community is still sifting through the large amount of data, so there is no doubt that more interesting information will be revealed. One of the more interesting finds is the development of iconic maps and their gameplay elements, or there’s Bungie’s technical manual. A cryptic readme file hints at more to come, and a modified version of a Deus Ex dialog was used as a teaser. Is this Deus Ex?

Dedicated fans have been able to put together playable beta builds of Halo 1 from the early stages of development, when the game was radically different from the iconic first-person shooter it eventually became and was essentially the defining IP for Xbox in its first decade (Halo 4 might be included in late 2012… but Halo 5: Guardians a few years later, not so much).

Somehow a leak like this seems to happen every year. Last year it was Insomniac Games, this year it’s Halo Studios. It’s becoming a tradition… and with the Halo franchise, we recently wrote about why Master Chief, the iconic Spartan, didn’t show up in Halo Wars. The answer was logical…

Source: TheGamePost

Playable beta builds of Halo 1 just dropped today, from before the game became an FPS pic.twitter.com/SLMy2cfo7r

— Vinícius Medeiros (@VinciusMedeiro6) December 26, 2024