Cut Halo: Combat Evolved weapons

This page discusses elements of deleted material and cut content. Some information on the page is sourced from game files and may not be verifiable through external sources. Where possible, such information should be clearly-marked and replaced with a proper external source as soon as one is available.

"At that time we were just like "what if we did this?" and we built it, got it in the game and it just sat there. Some of them made it into the final game, some of them sat there and withered on the vine."

— Marcus Lehto discussing the weapons found in 2000-era builds of Combat Evolved.^[1]

During the development of Halo: Combat Evolved, the game went through many different styles including a strategy game, a third-person shooter and a first-person shooter. Throughout these iterations, many different weapons were cut from the game, some of which presenting notably different design styles from those found in the final 2001 release. Most known cut weapons are from the 1999-2000 era builds of Combat Evolved, during which time the game was intended to be a third-person shooter. However, a small handful from the FPS era are known.^[2]

At the time of the game's development, Bungie had a creative attitude to weapons creation - weapons were often designed with a question of what could be done, with details of how it might work in-game left to be figured out later. Due to this, there is no guarantee most of these weapons would have ever made it into a final build.^[1] However, the ideas or designs for many of them would later make their way into subsequent Halo entries, in particular Halo 2.

Of particular note is the timeframe at which Halo started development. The initial RTS that would later become Halo begun development in 1997 under the codename "Armor", and as such many of the early designs for human weapons and equipment bear strong visual similarities from real-world Cold War weapons programs active in the 1990s and late 1980s. These include the Objective Individual Combat Weapon, AAI CAWS and H&K CAWS, Denel NTW-20, Steyr IWS 2000, Walther WA 2000 and others. Additional inspirations for human weaponry were based on popular science fiction media of the 1980s and 1990s - particularly 1986's Aliens and 1997's Starship Troopers - the latter of which released the same year as Halo beginning its development.

Human[edit]

Chaingun[edit]

The chaingun is a tri-barrelled rotary cannon that could be held with two hands by the player. It was frequently seen in promotional material for the game including the first-ever screenshot released, though was ultimately cut. The tags for the weapon, as-restored by Digsite, refer to it as the "needler", presumably inspiring the name of the Covenant weapon of the same name. It is unclear whether this may suggest a design intent similar to real-world needleguns.

The concept was later revived with the AIE-486H machine gun in Halo 3.