The parade of New Year’s game leaks continues. Following the design documents of the old GTA and the source code of the re-release of Saints Row IV, tens of gigabytes of materials on the Halo franchise have become publicly available.
Image source: xbox
The leak was reported to be a collaboration between Halo Studios (formerly 343 Industries) and the Digsite modding team, which has been working to restore content within the series since last summer.
Halo Studios and Digsite had already released the same Halo 2 demo from E3 2003 and planned to restore the original Halo demo from Macworld 1999, when the game was still in third person and was positioned as a Mac exclusive.
A new leak, however, allows us to touch history today (see video above) – a Halo demo from 1999, along with another 90 GB of materials on various games in the series (unreleased content, documents, tools) have become publicly available.
Former members of the Digsite team who commented on the leak confirmed the authenticity of the materials (we will not provide a link to them) and refused to take responsibility for what happened.
According to one of the ex-members of Digsite, many left the team in protest against the terms of cooperation with Microsoft: modders worked for free and without help (at least in terms of resources) from the company.
Meanwhile, in October, Halo Studios confirmed work on several projects within the franchise. Future games in the series are based on Unreal Engine 5, and not the studio’s internal engine Slipspace.