Last year, 343 Industries teamed up with a coalition of community modders to dive into the "darkest depths of ancient folders" and salvage what they could from the cut room floor of 2001's "Halo: Combat Evolved" and bring those scraps to PC in 2019. They will bring it to the Master Chief Collection, which will be released on the Halo: Waypoint website.

They announced a three-part blog series: "Cutting Room Floor," "Cutting Room Corps," and "Cutting Room Lore," followed by community writer Alex Wakeford's " Secret Circle 10 of Hell (Cutting Room Floor of Game Development)," they have been in the dark for the past week, tweaking what they call "the secret 10th lap of hell (the Cutting Room Floor of game development). Fortunately, they have come back from "Cortana's Hell" alive and delivered a gem of a piece of work.

The blog post begins with the more ambitious multiplayer experience maps that were not included in the retail version of Halo PC: "Some of these made the cut before being given evocative names beyond gbx_map#. Nevertheless, two were playtested within MCC and were interesting enough to cross the finish line." The maps found were Indoor and Dusk, which were remade into Underground and Abyss by the team's modder.

The rest of the blog dives into a treasure trove of cut content. Among the more fascinating relics, however, are indications of Halo's earlier conception as both a third-person shooter and an RTS.

From Over the Shoulder, a number of weapons: "We would like to point out that the recovered weapons shown below are from the Third Person era of Halo development [...]. All of the weapons in the pre-release Halo: CE that were cut with the First Person model in these Digsite releases were made from scratch by the team as a labor of love!"

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The arsenal included assault rifles/grenade launchers and SMGs with side mags, which the team had to create custom animations and models to make them first-person perspective. Another direction was also built to organize the revived third-person view mode: "The CE engine can now support third-person weapons and recreate the look of the original."

But what I like best about this submission is that it calls back to the strange concept phase of 'Halo' as an RTS." After internal testing and discussion, we finally decided to release these as data-only assets due to the lack of documentation on weapons and performance [...]. .

Look at these guys. I want a low-poly plushie for all of them, and while Halo ultimately realized its original RTS ambitions with Halo Wars and Halo Wars: 2, nothing in either title will capture my heart like these chubby youngsters.

There's too much going on to list here, so I highly recommend diving into the blog post. There are spooky animals, scrapped vehicles and enemies, and details that bring the crunchy sound effects in development up to modern standards. There may also be a new music track: "Of course, this is far from the culmination of Halo's journey into audio"

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While I am not a huge Halo fan myself, I am fascinated by the preservation of the game and cannot wait to see what the team digs up next. The team will be updating their second blog on July 14 with "some of the additions the crew has been working on, from the E3 2003 demo of "Halo 2" to the Guardians cut from "Halo 3" to more weapons, maps, vehicles, characters, and general awesomeness." We plan to reveal.