THE BUZZ: Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary campaign developer Saber Interactive claims it was their technology that convinced Microsoft to partner with them on the game.

“It was definitely our technology and the solution we came up with. One of the things Microsoft said is they needed the gameplay to be exact. Halo fans are extremely exacting and the gameplay couldn’t be changed,” said Matthew Karch, CEO of Saber Interactive. ”We came up with a way to do that and preserve the gameplay. I think we’ve mentioned this, and it’s public, but we took the Bungie engine and we plugged it into ours, so the game itself is running in the original Bungie code but the rendering of the world and the engine is ours, so we basically took the game scripting and AI and plugged it in.”

“If you drew a circle you can picture the original Bungie engine fully within the circle of our engine, almost like a wrapper. My partner Andre came up with that idea, we gave them a demo very quickly and said ‘hey look, you can toggle’. That’s something that Dan Ayoub from Microsoft really wanted, the toggle feature; he wanted to switch between classic and new. We showed them that and they we’re like ‘holy s**t, ok’,” he added.

EGM’s TAKE: The flash back feature in Halo Anniversary is really a feat of genius on Saber’s part and could well be the idea that the game will be remembered for.

Do you like the flash back feature? Leave your thoughts below.

Source: CVG