Bread’s Game Journal 01/17/22: Oh My God They Actually Shut Off Halo 3.

I’m not being even a little facetious when I say what I’m about to say: It just hit me that they turned off the Halo 3 servers, and it’s going to take awhile to get over it. I know this happened days ago, I know you can still play Halo 3 multiplayer looking better than ever on the Master Chief Collection, and I know local multiplayer will always work…..but they shut the servers off. I spent so much time on those servers and now they’re just gone.

At the peak of it’s popularity I must have spent hours on Halo 3 every single day after school. I was a high school freshman and pretty much all me or my friends would talk about was this game. We’d compare screenshots we took, brag about games we did great in, mess around in Forge. Even before the game released we all obsessed over Halo 3 in a way I don’t think I’ve even come close to doing again with any other game, and probably never will. Now all of that is just….lost.

Again, I know I could go back and play the game in it’s updated form, but all my original playtime, stats, armor sets, it’s all gone. All the pride I had finally managing to get the Overkill achievement (A borderline preposterous task that required you to kill every other player in a ranked Free For All Match at essentially the same time) has evaporated when they flipped off that switch. This is far from the first time a game I liked to play has had it’s servers flipped off for good, but this time, sitting in bed at nearly 11 at night….this time it feels really bad.

Online gaming was still pretty new back then, and frankly it’s absurd the servers were on as long as they were, but it still feels bizarre knowing it’s gone. I’ll always have the memories at least. Big Team Battle on Valhalla, good times.