It’s been over ten years since Bungie released their final Halo title Halo: Reach on the Xbox 360. Since then, the studio has broken away from Microsoft and created their own successful IP, Destiny, leaving the Halo franchise in the hands of 343 Industries. Now Bungie has decided to remove what many fans consider the final bastion of the studio’s connection to the Halo series, their dedicated website for tracking statistics, screenshots, and custom game modes. The studio announced on their This Week at Bungie post that they will be taking halo.bungie.net offline for good next month on February 9.
The post itself is filled mostly with updates for Destiny 2, but if you continue near the bottom of the page, you’ll see the small headliner “Dust and Echoes” where they quickly outline their plans for the doomed website. “On February 9, the halo.bungie.net website will be taken offline permanently. Everyone is welcome to save their stats and files, however they can, if they’d like to save anything. Please keep in mind that our News articles, Forums, and Groups were imported into the current version of Bungie.net back in 2013.”
As we already mentioned, Bungie handed off the franchise to 343 Industries in 2010, ending their contractual obligations to Microsoft and forging their own path. 343 themselves would end up remastering all of the Bungie Halo titles under the Master Chief Collection for the Xbox home console and recently for PC. However, Bungie kept their vast library of all the aforementioned statistics around, albeit without any major updates for the better part of nine years. Now, in less than a few weeks, it will be no more.
It goes without saying that this site is essentially holy ground for most of the older Halo fans, serving as a nostalgic placeholder of their accomplishments, and their crushing defeats. They were already dealt some sad news just last month when 343 Industries announced that all of the Halo Xbox 360 titles servers would be shut down in December 2021. While this is the unfortunate progression of things in the industry, it’s still an irreplaceable piece of history for some. As the video game market changes and evolves over time, the power of nostalgia only grows with it, and for many gamers out there, that’s more important than any new AAA title.
Thankfully, Bungie is allowing anyone to go through the site and save their statistics and files before it’s shut down. For those who wish to hold onto their favorite Halo memory from 2004-2010, you have until February 9 to do so.