The College Try: Failed PC Ports Of Console Games

Halo 2 Vista

A PC port of the first Halo game from Bungie (handled mostly by Gearbox Software) was a huge critical and sales success thanks in part to improved graphics and some extra content. So when the word came down that Halo 2 was going to get a PC port many folks thought that it would be a repeat.

Unfortunately, Halo 2's publisher Microsoft made several critical errors in its PC port of Halo 2 (released in 2007, two and a half years after the original Xbox version). One was they dumped Gearbox and created their own in-house team to port the game. Another was the decision not to improve the graphics other than put in some higher res textures. Yet another was to make it exclusive to users of Windows Vista, leaving all those XP gamers out in the cold (even with the Vista exclusivity the game did not support DirectX10). The result was a port that looked old, played old and had a limited audience. We wonder why Microsoft even bothered.

03/10/08