After 25 years, Halo can be remembered for many things. It’s among the best launch games of all time, which was pivotal in making Xbox a serious console contender. Its campaign was so brilliantly designed, from set pieces like The Silent Cartographer to the distinct and believable AI behaviors, that it was one of the few games at the time that compelled me to replay on its hardest difficulty.
But perhaps what has made it so meaningful and memorable over the years–which is sadly absent from the recent Halo: Campaign Evolved–is its competitive multiplayer. And I can’t really think about Halo multiplayer without thinking of Blood Gulch, especially when it was essentially the only map I would ever play with friends.
Multiplayer sessions fixated on just one map was a bit of a common occurrence among my friends, given the countless sleepovers that involved GoldenEye on the N64 and doing nothing but having shootouts in the toilets of Facility. In comparison, Halo took a while to make an imprint for us, considering that I had to wait until the following Christmas after its launch before I could get an Xbox.
I was also the only person among my friends to own Microsoft’s console, but Halo’s influence would spread like The Flood when I introduced it to my friend Josh. We had gone to different schools in sixth form but stayed in touch as I was going to church back then, so it became a ritual that after evening service, he would come around to my place to work through Halo’s campaign in co-op. By the end of its explosive final mission, he was converted and got his own Xbox.
It was also at this point where we were able to meaningfully experience Halo’s multiplayer. After all, shooting at each other in 1v1 matches was a bit one-note, but Josh also had younger brothers, so suddenly I was going over to his house with spare controllers so we could play four-player splits-screen just like the N64 days. This was when we got our introduction to Blood Gulch, a name I had only been able to read about for months, but would become permanently etched from thereon.
On the face of it, Blood Gulch is the antithesis of a typical FPS map, its canyon design giving too much space in a genre that’s often more fast-paced, with fewer tactical corners to poke around. However, the open field was also what made it viable for vehicular action, letting you rampage with your pal on a Warthog or run someone over with a Ghost. But when thinking of its semi-symmetrical layout with a base at each end, it also brings to mind a large football field, which also leads me to Capture the Flag.
Halo may not have invented this mode, but as a console gamer first, it was my real introduction to it, and felt transformative. While in the days of GoldenEye we would quite happily run around shooting each other, now we actually had a concrete goal to work towardr as a team, which also didn’t feel completely different from the attack and defense of five-a-side football.
Even so, there’s only so much potential you can wring out of 2v2 CTF, with one side haplessly carrying the flag while the other tries to fight off the opposing Spartans, and we occasionally made things harder on ourselves by turning off vehicles.
The bigger game changer was discovering the System Link Cable that allowed us to connect multiple Xbox consoles together, which was how I got my first taste of a LAN party. I could also count on Josh to evangelize on Halo’s behalf so that we ended up roping in enough folks from church to get together for 4v4 matches (this was still only half of its full potential, as it was actually possible to connect up to four Xbox systems for 16-player multiplayer).
It was via this method that we really got to appreciate the balanced yet asymmetrical design of Blood Gulch, such as how the Red team has access to a ridge that’s a perfect sniping spot, while the Blue team is closer to a tunnel system, though that doesn’t prevent each team from taking advantage of either route. The base would be at one moment a quiet place to shoot banter with another defending teammate before exploding into tight shootouts when someone tried to make a scramble for the flag.
I’ve played many more team-based FPS games over the years too, but few ever have as as memorable a moments ascatching the glint of a sniper hiding behind Sniper’s Rock and then trying to sneak your way up to take them out first, the foolhardy derring-do of stealing a flag while praying your invisibility power-up lasts, or having everyone pile into a Scorpion tank and going in loud.
Given the setup required, I would be lying if I said I got to experience Halo via System Link more than a handful of times. After all, the first time we managed to organize this event was the summer before I went away to university, where I was back to being the only person in my immediate circle who was gaming, let alone an Xbox owner. Of course, the year Halo 2 came out and I was back for the holidays, we naturally wrangled people together again to link up and load up its Blood Gulch remake, Coagulation, taking to the new additions like energy swords and Banshees even if they might have upset its predecessor’s balance. It’s the seemingly all-night-long sessions at Blood Gulch that are so burned into my memory.
I don’t think I’m alone in that, given the map’s popularity over the years, having not only been remade by Bungie in subsequent entries, but even by the community the moment the Forge update was added to Halo Infinite. In later years, its beloved status has found it being remade in other shooters, including CS:GO and Fortnite. But beyond the genre, its cultdom was arguably cemented by the web series Red vs. Blue, its creator Burnie Burns perfectly tapping into its desolate desert as a space for contemplating existentialist themes on almost the same level as a Samuel Beckett play.
But for all the ways that Halo has evolved over the years, for me it was Halo: The Master Chief Collection getting a System Link update in 2018 that was the most meaningful. Over that time, I had stopped going to church and even spent many years a lapsed gamer, but once the habit had kicked back in, I had also gotten back in touch with Josh. While we had caught up with various online multiplayer games, such as Destiny and Overwatch, the opportunity to relive Halo LAN parties 15 years later was something we just had to seize.
Of course, we had all gotten older with more responsibilities and busy schedules, but there was something special about how despite the different paths we’d taken, Halo somehow brought us back together for one night, albeit with each team huddling around a larger and sharper monitor than the CRT TVs we made do with back in the day. And despite Halo MCC including the new Bloodlines map–a remake of Coagulation–when it came to setting up a Capture the Flag session, there was no question that Blood Gulch was our unanimous pick as a pure nostalgia hit.
Halo may feel like a shadow of its former self these days, its recent campaign remake feeling more like a pristine eulogy than a path toward the future, which will now be under the direction of Activision.
But no matter how bleak or uncertain that future looks, at least we’ll always have Blood Gulch.
