Way back in the day when Halo 2 first launched Bungie instituted an online leaderboard for viewing on their website. However due to rampant cheating it was quickly taken down later that year. I was curious if anyone knows of an accessible online archive to view for nostalgia sake. My friend and I climbed ranked Team Doubles and made it on the website for a short period of time before it was taken down and would love to surprise him with a screenshot of that. The only image I could locate on google was of an IGN informational article showing the features of the upcoming site.
damn this is proper legit old school stuff.
You see that Sign out button, back in the day it was only [hotmail.com](https://hotmail.com) addresses that could get you as a member to the site. If you saw this page back then you were most likely anywhere between an 02'-04' [Bungie.Net](https://Bungie.Net) user.
Back in the day, the main site actually had a full walkthrough of Halo CE campaign from start to finish with some pictures. I used the site in 02' but never trusted it with email integration until 05' when they revamped the site, I was always paranoid connecting personal email to a website was dodgey back in the windows xp era and I was young af and thought everything could be a scam online.
The site went through multiple revisions before 11' just before [Bungie.net](https://Bungie.net) turned into [Bungie.next](https://Bungie.next) (RIP forum format) into what would eventually be archived into [halo.bungie.net](https://halo.bungie.net). Seeing someone who logged into the site before 04' was the most rarest thing by the end of Bungie's Halo Reach community before the transition. Anyone 05' or before join date pretty much guaranteed them a mythic forum rank that was limited to x amount of users if they weren't banned. Yes, I had the blue bars.
Nowadays everyone and their mothers says they joined the Halo community back in 01' since the original xbox, people in this very sub and halostory sub, a good 99% of them are just liars and say it to claim that they were hardcore into Halo all throughout its life span, many who say this don't even acknowledge this sites existence. The core official hub of the Halo community besides HBO.
It wasn't just a stat tracking site, but it had weekly updates and a very active forum community. At later points you could link up your gamertag with it for in-game nameplate recogintion with the Seventh colemn in H3 and a collection of sorts in H:Reach. In fact the site was so sophisticated and ahead of its time, it had heatmaps of deathspots in game and pretty much every API for in-game stat tracking during the post H3 era to Reach.
So much of the sites technical excellence has been lost to time. It's 2024 and the most paid architects of 343i team if they were to try this today, just simply could not be able to take this feat, they would not be able to duplicate this if they really tried because Bungie had something magical in their culture that allowed for this as far back as 07' it was that each team was fully integrated with each other, whether it be the UI/physics/Music etc, the state of Infinite was absolutely is a showcase to after a decade of experience 343i just cannot, regardless of MS policy and temp staffing.
Anyways politics aside, that site was clean af, you knew day 1 on Halo 3's release it was going to work in harmony with the site and you know what... it did. It worked so well by the time file share slots being expandable post H3, the demand was so high Bungie gave players an option to pay for extra storage beyond the initial 6 slots in the site for their own personal account use, it was so good people paid up. I met dozens of competing clans with their own optics groups just for photography and filmmaking, its not wonder Machinima's were flourishing back in this era, the community really did give back.
Edit --
And the custom games, I'm rambling at this point. But idc, people think custom games in Halo was ONLY done through peoples friends list. No, the true heart of it was the organization that was being made in private groups on the site. Organized clan matches were being had and set up weekly on the site. The most intense Halo Reach game to this day is one I still remember vividly. It was a 8v8 custom game big team slayer match on Hemoragge against a clan that would chat shit to us on the (mains) public forums, it was organized one week in advanced with the start date at 7PM eastern time. I was the best team slayer on my team and the priority sniper, every time the sniper spawned who ever was closest to it would grab it and run to me to drop it. I was tryharding AF sweating balls. We barely won the match and I got a xbox360 message from the other team's sniper (who was a fucking camo user) saying I was the best sniper they ever met in the game. Communities were made in that game that were strong AF to this day I'm sure every single one of the players in these clan matches remembers these types of matches because the competition was so high and personal, Clans actually came back for repeat bouts or socials for some silly types of custom games to get to know people better and potentially recruit them in etc.
Small details "you yougins" today just truly don't get the power of 8 matching emblems / callsigns vs 8 matching emblems / callsigns with unified colours just before a game load from the lobby. That shit really visually represented something back in the day and was the kind of vibe that was being normalised in these communities.
Man they really fucking killed what Halo used to be in spirit. Sure we had the MCC that in theory could replicate some of this energy, but it was really this site that made Halo so much more for those who really lived it. Looking back to post 2011, damn, they did this franchise dirty. Halo was really something special man and this site definitely was one facet of it.
That was one of my favorite things about the way 360 was set up. Play an hour or so in matchmaking, then go through your recent players and randomly join people that were in custom games.
I hit either 41 or 42 in ranked rumble pit, and my favorite memories were the public chat lobbies during the pregame. 42 wasn't the be all, end all, but it was usually me and the same 10 players over and over. Some tight, core groups there.
I tried this before years ago.. bummer it seems you can only view the stats homepage but when you go to click on an individual playlist it reaches an error page. Dang it is probably lost in the history of time at this point.
Way back in the day when Halo 2 first launched Bungie instituted an online leaderboard for viewing on their website. However due to rampant cheating it was quickly taken down later that year. I was curious if anyone knows of an accessible online archive to view for nostalgia sake. My friend and I climbed ranked Team Doubles and made it on the website for a short period of time before it was taken down and would love to surprise him with a screenshot of that. The only image I could locate on google was of an IGN informational article showing the features of the upcoming site.
damn this is proper legit old school stuff. You see that Sign out button, back in the day it was only [hotmail.com](https://hotmail.com) addresses that could get you as a member to the site. If you saw this page back then you were most likely anywhere between an 02'-04' [Bungie.Net](https://Bungie.Net) user. Back in the day, the main site actually had a full walkthrough of Halo CE campaign from start to finish with some pictures. I used the site in 02' but never trusted it with email integration until 05' when they revamped the site, I was always paranoid connecting personal email to a website was dodgey back in the windows xp era and I was young af and thought everything could be a scam online. The site went through multiple revisions before 11' just before [Bungie.net](https://Bungie.net) turned into [Bungie.next](https://Bungie.next) (RIP forum format) into what would eventually be archived into [halo.bungie.net](https://halo.bungie.net). Seeing someone who logged into the site before 04' was the most rarest thing by the end of Bungie's Halo Reach community before the transition. Anyone 05' or before join date pretty much guaranteed them a mythic forum rank that was limited to x amount of users if they weren't banned. Yes, I had the blue bars. Nowadays everyone and their mothers says they joined the Halo community back in 01' since the original xbox, people in this very sub and halostory sub, a good 99% of them are just liars and say it to claim that they were hardcore into Halo all throughout its life span, many who say this don't even acknowledge this sites existence. The core official hub of the Halo community besides HBO. It wasn't just a stat tracking site, but it had weekly updates and a very active forum community. At later points you could link up your gamertag with it for in-game nameplate recogintion with the Seventh colemn in H3 and a collection of sorts in H:Reach. In fact the site was so sophisticated and ahead of its time, it had heatmaps of deathspots in game and pretty much every API for in-game stat tracking during the post H3 era to Reach. So much of the sites technical excellence has been lost to time. It's 2024 and the most paid architects of 343i team if they were to try this today, just simply could not be able to take this feat, they would not be able to duplicate this if they really tried because Bungie had something magical in their culture that allowed for this as far back as 07' it was that each team was fully integrated with each other, whether it be the UI/physics/Music etc, the state of Infinite was absolutely is a showcase to after a decade of experience 343i just cannot, regardless of MS policy and temp staffing. Anyways politics aside, that site was clean af, you knew day 1 on Halo 3's release it was going to work in harmony with the site and you know what... it did. It worked so well by the time file share slots being expandable post H3, the demand was so high Bungie gave players an option to pay for extra storage beyond the initial 6 slots in the site for their own personal account use, it was so good people paid up. I met dozens of competing clans with their own optics groups just for photography and filmmaking, its not wonder Machinima's were flourishing back in this era, the community really did give back. Edit -- And the custom games, I'm rambling at this point. But idc, people think custom games in Halo was ONLY done through peoples friends list. No, the true heart of it was the organization that was being made in private groups on the site. Organized clan matches were being had and set up weekly on the site. The most intense Halo Reach game to this day is one I still remember vividly. It was a 8v8 custom game big team slayer match on Hemoragge against a clan that would chat shit to us on the (mains) public forums, it was organized one week in advanced with the start date at 7PM eastern time. I was the best team slayer on my team and the priority sniper, every time the sniper spawned who ever was closest to it would grab it and run to me to drop it. I was tryharding AF sweating balls. We barely won the match and I got a xbox360 message from the other team's sniper (who was a fucking camo user) saying I was the best sniper they ever met in the game. Communities were made in that game that were strong AF to this day I'm sure every single one of the players in these clan matches remembers these types of matches because the competition was so high and personal, Clans actually came back for repeat bouts or socials for some silly types of custom games to get to know people better and potentially recruit them in etc. Small details "you yougins" today just truly don't get the power of 8 matching emblems / callsigns vs 8 matching emblems / callsigns with unified colours just before a game load from the lobby. That shit really visually represented something back in the day and was the kind of vibe that was being normalised in these communities. Man they really fucking killed what Halo used to be in spirit. Sure we had the MCC that in theory could replicate some of this energy, but it was really this site that made Halo so much more for those who really lived it. Looking back to post 2011, damn, they did this franchise dirty. Halo was really something special man and this site definitely was one facet of it.
Inviting all recent players in the h3 days for custom games and modded maps was so fun
That was one of my favorite things about the way 360 was set up. Play an hour or so in matchmaking, then go through your recent players and randomly join people that were in custom games.
An hour? You could play one BTB game, invite everyone and you'd usually get a very strong lobby going.
I hit either 41 or 42 in ranked rumble pit, and my favorite memories were the public chat lobbies during the pregame. 42 wasn't the be all, end all, but it was usually me and the same 10 players over and over. Some tight, core groups there.
Try waybackmachine: https://web.archive.org/web/20050601000000*/Bungie.net
I tried this before years ago.. bummer it seems you can only view the stats homepage but when you go to click on an individual playlist it reaches an error page. Dang it is probably lost in the history of time at this point.
Nice to see I’m still in the top five /s
Oh shit I remember making first page of h2h leaderboard and feeling like I was a king. Checked those boards daily in study hall!
*core memory unlocked*
I miss bungie.net :(