Halo was incredible. It was a very special unique IP that came with a sense of atmosphere I had not seen ever before. Halo was carried massively by its unusual design aesthetics (colorful almost "cute" aliens", bright palettes), it's music (a mix of tribal and holistic religious). It had an impressive co-op mode, an incredible A.I that I have yet to this day, not seen anything like.
It featured some of the best levels I have ever seen in a video game, and thanks to the AI I replayed my favorite levels many many times.
Halo to me, was abusing the lan system to play online with XboxConnect. It was a wonderful broken experience.
Halos lore and mythology was very interesting in how non-explanatory it was. You got a sense they tried to build something mysterious. The lack of deeper narraive direction served Halo and made the influences it had to things like other science fiction novels and movies, stand out as a good thing.
The low gravity was unusual. It's floaty arcade style gameplay was mixed with some unusual strategic elements like two-weapon swaps which was something you only saw in games like operation flashpoint and ghost recon. The Warthog jeep handled unlike anything I had ever seen before, it was bizarre and wonderful that the "starter pistol" was balanced to be as powerful as the later game weapons. the rechargeable health was also unusual.
When you go down the list of things you see in FPS today, you can credit Halo for a lot of it. So much of what made it revolutionary at the time, became the foundation for how first person shooters could operate on consoles. Goldeneye and Perfect Dark were loved, but there always was a sense that the N64 controller was an accuired compromise. The dual analog trigger design hadn't been done succesfully before Halo.
Halo, is also the one game that Sony never really managed to 1up- Both on PS2 and PS3 you had many attempts by different devs to make a compelling FPS, but nothing really came close.
Halo reminds me of my late teens. I was already a fan. My stepdad had introduced me to Marathon, so I was part of the small but incredible Bungie-Net community; which was very special. I was there when Halo got turned into an Xbox exclusive (total meltdown and anger towards Microsoft), I was there when Xbox Live was delayed and the game and Halo would ship without Online at all. Weirdly enough, being part of a gaming community like Bungie in the late 90s was different from today. Also because Bungie was a Mac developer who was noticed and presented by Jobs himself. We were many who had the opinion that Marathon was way more interesting than Doom.
I was many years on TeamXbox later, and I remember that Half-Life 2 overshadowed Halo 2 significantly. Halo 2 had an incredible emotional and beautiful announcement trailer, but the following e3, Half-Life 2 had a revolutionary gameplay presentation of the game and the source engine. HL2 was such a large forward technically.
Despite this, I was way more fascinated with the lore and mythos of Halo than I was with Gordon Freeman and that story. The dystopian world of Half-Life didn't mean that much to me, even though it was a technically superior game and used shadows and dynamic physics in a way that was not seen before.
Halo 3 was the last Halo game I played, and that was enough. I was ready to move on. After playing games on PC like Battlefield 2 with 64 players and CS Source, I just couldn't go back to Xbox Live and 16 player p2p garbage. So I moved past Halo. Because of Xbox Live.
I remember loving Halo 3. I thought it was really great and superior in campaign to Halo 2. I was very happy that it was a massive success, but Halo had completely changed along with the core fanbase. Suddenly there was toys, comics and all sorts of other things. As I got older I felt a bit out of touch with the franchise, and I think a lot of older Bungie fans felt that as well.