Halo 2: Anniversary

Halo: The Master Chief Collection was released on November 11, 2014, originally as an Xbox One exclusive, and it contains Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary, Halo 2: Anniversary, Halo 3, and Halo 4. While Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary is a port of the Xbox 360 version, and Halo 3 and 4 only contain slight visual upgrades, Halo 2: Anniversary was built from the ground up for the collection, and was never released as a standalone game.

Microsoft's original plan for Halo 4 was to release it for Xbox One as a launch title in November 2013, but then pushed the release up to November 2012. This left a significant gap between the release of Halo 4, and the planned release of Halo 5 in October 2015. This gap resulted in the creation of Halo: The Master Chief Collection, which was originally intended to be only a remaster of Halo 2 for it's 10th anniversary in 2014, much in the same way that Halo: Combat Evolved was remastered for it's 10th anniversary in 2011. During the development of Halo 2 Anniversary, 343 Industries decided it would be a great opportunity to bundle all 4 Halo games up to that point into a single collection as Halo: The Master Chief Collection.

While the campaign for Halo 2 Anniversary was created by Saber Interactive, the same developer behind Halo Combat Evolved Anniversary, the multiplayer was created by Certain Affinity. The original release of Halo 2 contained 24 multiplayer maps, but Certain Affinity was on a very tight schedule, so they chose 6 maps out of the 24 maps in Halo 2 to remaster. Due to campaign and multiplayer being created by different studios, the campaign runs on the Saber3D engine, and the multiplayer runs on a heavily modified Halo 4 engine. Being that Halo 4 is an Xbox 360 game, it was always possible that Halo 2: Anniversary was on Xbox 360, but there was no concrete evidence of this... until today.

Today, we are releasing 6 prototypes of Halo 2: Anniversary, dating from March 21, 2014 to April 17, 2014. These prototypes were recovered from Xbox 360 development kit hard drives provided by VexingEnmity in the summer of 2025. All six builds have had a thorough recovery pass, and every file is a recovered match to the MD5 hashes included within the build directory. Four of the six total recovered builds required additional recovery, and here is a summary of all the additional work that was required to fully fix each of the builds:

March 21, 2014 - 21646.14.03.21.0841.ca - ca_ascension.map was fragmented, and the root file entries were destroyed, so all of the files were recovered manually.

March 28, 2014 - 21651.14.03.28.1525-3.ca - ca_lockout.map and ca_sanctuary.map were fragmented, and the root file entries were destroyed, so all of the files were recovered manually.

March 28, 2014 - 21651.14.03.28.1525-7.ca - ca_lockout.map was fragmented.

April 17, 2014 - 21659.14.04.17.1655-1.ca - ca_ascension.map was fragmented.

As the game was developed on a tight schedule, there are major differences between each of the builds - the differences between the earliest build, March 21st, 2014, and the latest build, April 17th, 2014 are numerous, and some levels have gone from a complete blockout to nearly finished art.

Another great example of how early these builds are is Bloodline, which is known as Coagulation in these builds. The earliest version of the map looks almost nothing like the final version of the map, and the only real similarities they share are the layouts, and almost no art has been done at this point in development.

We are incredibly excited to release these builds today with all of their fixes, and we can't wait to see what other changes are found in them. This is only the beginning, and we have so much left to share with you from other Halo projects... it is almost unreal what we have left to share with you. Thank you for reading, and enjoy these prototypes of Halo 2: Anniversary!