Halo 2 is 20 years old but its multiplayer is still top-tier

Halo 2 has graduated from its teens and entered early adulthood—ancient by video game metrics—but the second installment in Master Chief’s saga is far from geriatric.

Two decades after its release, the middle child of Bungie’s original trilogy maintains pole position as a landmark FPS, even more so than its predecessor. Halo 2 iterated on its older sibling in every way possible but it wasn’t without help.

Microsoft’s then freshly-minted Xbox Live online service paved the way for Halo 2’s legs to stretch far beyond a one-and-done campaign and local LAN parties. It went global, opening the gates for millions of Spartans to test their mettle against each other in a friendly digital playground.

An alien concept nowadays, but in the fledgling world of early noughties online gaming, common courtesy had yet to be discarded. Custom games, not the usual gamut of shmup modes you find in most shooters, became the lifeblood of Halo 2, born from a strong community spirit and desire to engage with emergent gameplay.

Bungie would eventually provide proper support for fan-made content with Halo 3’s Forge mode, but until then, the community had to rely on honor rules to make its huge list of custom game rules work, Infected being chief among them.

A staple, officially supported mode in later entries, Infected required one player—the zombie—to ‘infect’ normal Spartans using only the Energy Sword to kill their prey. Any Spartan caught by their undead opponents had to manually switch teams and adopt the rules of a zombie.

Halo 2 swiftly became a party game in all but name from then on, exploding with a creative, casual-friendly suite of inane (in the best way possible) custom games just by answering what-if scenarios.

What would it be like to eschew gunplay and have a lobby of 16 players jump in Warthogs and relentlessly collide with each other? Bumper Cars. Why not confine one team to Covenant Wraith tanks and have them chase down the smaller, nimbler Warthogs on Coagulation? Cat and Mouse.

Tower of Power, a personal favorite, repurposed Halo 2’s Ascension map into a proto-base defense minigame. Both teams fought for control of its main tower, outfitted with a minigun perfectly positioned to plow down any Spartan attempting to wrest back ownership. Dreadfully unbalanced? You bet, but fun as hell for a teenager with nothing but time.

Others, such as President (or VIP; the name could vary from lobby to lobby) and SWAT, were adopted by Bungie much like Infected, becoming wildly popular alternatives to Team Deathmatch and Big Team Battle for more competitive-minded players.

Microsoft waved goodbye to Halo 2’s online features when it ended online support for the original Xbox in 2010, returning four years later with 2014’s Master Chief Collection.

Boasting prettier visuals and its own independent Forge mode, the OG’s multiplayer magic lives on as a time capsule for the thirty and fortysomethings following John-117’s story from its very beginning. For everyone south of 30, it’s a snapshot of Halo’s Golden Age; a playable history lesson that still stands up today as a genre-leading FPS.