Something very special happened in our hobby this weekend. The Digsite team, a group of Halo modders who've been working with Halo Studios (formerly 343 Industries) to restore lost artifacts of Halo history, delivered a mother lode: A playable version of the legendary Halo 2 "Earth City" demo.
The mission, originally played live on stage at E3 2003, was the world's first look at the sequel. With a runtime just under nine minutes, the demo was a vertical slice created to introduce the Covenant's invasion of Earth and showcase features that would go on to make Halo 2 one of the most beloved (and criticized) chapters in the series 20 years later. Just listen to that crowd roar as they watch Master Chief dual-wield SMGs, ghost-jack a Brute, and fire the battle rifle for the first time (which at that point was a single-shot rifle like Reach's DMR). The Earth City mission was cut from the final campaign and left unseen for two decades, until now.
The (H2) E3 2003 Demo, as it's officially called, was uploaded to The Master Chief Collection Steam workshop by the Digsite team on November 9, Halo 2's 20th birthday. In a blog post on Halo Waypoint, community writer Alex Wakeford said it took lots of work to reconstruct the demo from a version of the Halo 2 engine that doesn't exist anymore, and that the intrepid modders had to tweak the scripting of the demo so that it wouldn't constantly break.
"Massive improvements have been made to the visual quality and overall stability of this experience, as the original demo required the player to hit specific individual triggers in order to ensure it did not break," the post reads. "Players will see that nav markers help to guide them through each beat of this mission from the moment they step off the Pelican all the way up to boarding the Ghost and escaping into the highway tunnel at the end."
Being mostly unfamiliar with this demo (I wasn't cool enough to watch E3 trailers at the age of seven), but having a handful of Halo 2 playthroughs under my belt, Earth City is a really remarkable thing. As soon as Chief stepped off the pelican, I felt like I'd been drafted into a stage play with no rehearsals. Predictably the demo lacks Halo's flexible sandbox, playing out more like an early Call of Duty campaign that grinds to a halt if you don't follow a particular NPC the correct way. Despite Digsite's best efforts to stabilize the scripting, and my best try at sticking to the critical path, I managed to softlock the mission at the moment Chief is supposed to pick up a second SMG. This is a finicky beast—can you imagine how hard then-Bungie cinematics director Joe Staten must've been sweating playing on stage that day?
It's neat to try out Bungie's scrapped gameplay experiments. The demo features this three-hit melee combo where Chief follows his initial gun bash with two more swift strikes. The maneuver looks great, but I could hear the conversation that probably led to its removal as I was beating down a brute—make melee more spammy and you upset Halo's already perfect "shoot-shoot-punch" combat loop. The DMR battle rifle is also super weird. In my mind, Halo 2 is synonymous with the rhythmic hum of the battle rifle's three-round burst. This single-shot version sounds weaker and just doesn't ring true as Master Chief's weapon of choice. Still, it's cool to see the wheels turning on what'd eventually become Halo: Reach's punchy DMR.
From a preservation standpoint, Earth City is nothing less than a miracle. It's an unreserved win for everybody that this notable piece of gaming history no longer has to exist solely as a grainy YouTube video, but more than that, Earth City is a huge demonstration of PC gaming's power. It's fantastic that Halo Studios has a real interest in preserving Halo's legacy, but this project would've gone nowhere without the Halo modding scene—a scene with foundations in Halo: Combat Evolved's earliest PC port, which continued with Halo 2's eventual Windows Vista release, and has since blossomed with official mod support in The Master Chief Collection.
Three days ago, Halo 2's lost E3 mission was an obscure piece of trivia, and now it's a thing you can play with three clicks. I can't think of a better argument for companies embracing the fans who want to preserve, remix, and generally keep aging games alive instead of being actively hostile toward them.
The Halo 2 Earth City demo is free download, but there is a small catch: It's only currently available on the MCC Steam workshop, so no console or Game Pass compatibility, and you have to own Halo 2: Anniversary for it to work. If you finish the demo and want to keep the warm and fuzzy Halo feelings rolling, might I suggest jumping into some Halo 2 multiplayer with its still-active community, or joining the nostalgia party going on in Halo Infinite.
