Fourth Try's a Charm
Newsletter 2026-07-31
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me four times, you must make video games.
I’m about to win the quadruple crown of being a sucker. I first bought the Xbox game Halo: Combat Evolved in college. By then, the console had been out for a few years. I was late to the party, but I made it the biggest party possible. Think four TVs and sixteen friends, or friend-adjacent acquaintances. You can’t expect me to actually find a double digit number of people who like me. I was extra excited about the game because it marked my first time owning a current generation console. My family usually got video game systems on sale when they were made obsolete by a newer system or as a hand-me-down from a friend whose parents were willing to spend entirely too much money. It’s why befriending only-children was key. By college, I had my own money. I should have saved it up to give myself an easier transition into adulthood, but I wanted to be a newspaper reporter. I was basically majoring in being poor. It made sense to throw away financial security from the start. Inspired by a friend who had an Xbox, I bought one and convinced two other friends to get systems as well. Then we crammed sixteen guys into the two upstairs bedrooms at my parents’ house, only one of which was adequately air conditioned, and proceeded to have the time of our lives. My parents were not sad to see me go back to college at the end of that summer. According to legend (and regular, working nostrils), you can still smell those parties today.
Years later, and after many other sequels in the Halo series, Microsoft re-released that original Halo game for the successor system, the Xbox 360. It was the second system, not the 360th, but the PlayStation 3 was out at the time, and Bill Gates couldn’t bear to face the world with a system ending in a two. I’d like to say customers are smarter than that, but we absolutely aren’t. For reference, I’m the guy who hasn’t finished explaining why I’m about to buy the same game for the fourth time. It serves me right that I eventually bought the third system, which was called the Xbox One. Don’t even get me started on the Xbox Series X, when the numbering got so out of hand that they switched to letters or possibly Roman numerals. I should be grateful that they didn’t put the entire name in Latin, although that could have helped Microsoft secure a rare branding deal with the Vatican. Back tracking several systems, Microsoft released Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary to mark ten years since the release of the original game and also to show off the leap in power from the Xbox to the Xbox 360. Those were both thinly veiled pretexts. The real reason was to make a shameless cash grab. I dutifully bought the game again and beat it on every difficulty setting. Yet, somehow, I’m still worse at it than all of my friends. I need to stop hanging out with people who have all their fingers. Give me a call if you’ve had an accident with fireworks.
A mere three years after that, Microsoft released the game yet again, this time as part of The Master Chief Collection, a single disc that boasted five old Halo games. I wasn’t just buying Halo: Combat Evolved for the third time; I was also buying four other Halo games for the second time. In my defense, even though I really don’t have one, it had a shared multiplayer lobby for all the games that let my friends and I jump around from sequel to sequel and also had a bunch of maps from PC versions that I had never played before. I loved the game, but I loved the sense of completion more. I finally had every material possession I could possibly want. I had no reason to ever buy any of those Halo games again. That contentment lasted until this week, when I had no choice but to buy the first Halo game for a fourth time, roughly twenty-three years after I made the first purchase. It’s not just because I’m dumb and highly susceptible to nostalgia, although those are both strong contributors. I also bought it because of my family. I thought it would bring me closer with my kids by reliving the old things I used to enjoy. That’s something people say when they spend entirely too much and justify it with their emotions. Microsoft is hardly the first to try that approach. It’s Disney’s entire business model.
This week, Microsoft is releasing the first Halo game for a fourth time. It has a slightly different subtitle which I can’t even remember. Given that it’s 2026, it probably includes the words “skibidi” and “bro.” The game has updated graphics, of course, as well as three all-new prequel missions. More importantly, it comes with an excuse. It gives me a reason to take a day off work and stay home and play through the entire campaign with my twelve-year-old, Lucy. We already beat this game together once in The Master Chief Collection, but that was with slightly inferior graphics, making it a completely different experience. I have three other daughters who I’d like to play the game with, but the series failed to hook their interest. I had to help make four whole people to end up with one who was willing to tolerate me for first-person shooter shenanigans. I thought that might be the case, which is why I kept expanding the family long before any of the kids were big enough to hold a controller. It took eight to ten years after each birth to figure out if my efforts were in vain. If only there were some kind of method in utero to test for gamers.
