Halo 2’s legendary E3 demo is finally playable, 20 years later

Sometimes it takes twenty years to settle a bet. The Halo 2 demo shown off at E3 2003 is finally playable by the public. As part of a broader celebration of Halo 2’s 20th anniversary, the demo will be available as a Steam Workshop mod for Halo: The Master Chief Collection, Xbox announced today in a blog post.

Sure, long-lost game demos are no rarity, thanks to the Beyond Good and Evil 2 Rule. But the Halo 2 E3 2003 demo is held to a higher regards in the hearts and minds of Halo fans, having achieved a deity-like status over the years. Though the demo ran just nine minutes, the Halopedia page for it alone spans thousands of words and dozens of archival images.

The demo showed series hero Master Chief battling the Covenant across a metropolitan area on Earth. At the time, the demo offered the series’ first glimpse of human life back home, while also displaying innovative (also for the time) gameplay mechanics, like the ability to drop-kick an enemy out of a moving vehicle. The demo ends with Master Chief activating a plasma grenade while surrounded by a small army of enemies. “Betcha can’t stick it,” Cortana, the AI companion of Master Chief, says. “You’re on,” he replies. Fade to black. (You can watch a version of the demo here.)

It was tantalizing way to sell a vision of what players could expect Halo 2. But the demo never materialized in the final version of Halo 2. Instead, the game opened with a battle on a space station.

The demo itself remained unplayable for decades, something modders have chalked up to absent source files. But developer 343 Industries announced in 2022 that it had located the source files and was working to release a playable build of the demo. Since then, though, the Halo series has through several years of turbulence.

In 2023, Microsoft laid off thousands of employees across its gaming division, including at 343 Industries. That was quickly followed by the departure of series steward Joseph Staten. The Halo TV show was then canceled after two seasons. At the 2024 Halo World Championship, 343 Industries rebranded into Halo Studios and announced “multiple” new games in the works. It’s safe to say that a 20-year-old demo was low on the list of priorities and expectations for Halo fans.

The 2003 E3 demo isn’t the only way Halo Studios is celebrating Halo 2’s 20th. The studio is also adding seven Halo 2 maps to Halo Infinite’s multiplayer mode: Ascension, Turf, Lockout, Warlock, Sanctuary, Beaver Creek, and Midship, a staple of nearly every Halo multiplayer mode for the past twenty years. All seven maps were made in Forge, Halo Infinite’s map-creation tool. While a bastardized version of Midship kind of already exists in Halo Infinite with the Starboard map, this newer iteration (known as Inquisitor in matchmaking playlists) is more faithful to the Halo 2 original: Yes, this one’s actually purple.