Color Blind Storytime: Halo 2

Like many eager young men across the US at midnight on November 9th, 2004 I waited in a long line at a mall just to get my hands on Halo 2 the moment it was released. Little did I know that this would turn into the first in a long, downward spiral of first person shooters wherein the coloration and texture hit the sweetspot that allowed for extremely non-colorblind-friendly imagery.

This was really the first time in the "Modern Era" of 3d games that I really noticed a major problem with my color blindness. The leap in the graphics engine from Halo: Combat Evolved to Halo 2 was quite a drastic change despite being on the same console and only a few years apart. The original Halo had, for the time, amazing graphics and beautiful environments, but most of the outdoor parts were high-contrast and featured a bright blue sky, bright green grass and a multitude of differing colors that really made me appreciate the present and future of games, and it wasn't impossible to play! In contrast, Halo 2 started to move more towards the gritty realism with active lighting and glow and my least favorite gaming trend: lots of brown. I mean, and there were A LOT of locations in the game with beautiful visuals, but at the same time it added more and more unfriendly coloration, especially in multiplayer.

This started a famous trend amongst my friends that almost NEVER worked out in my favor. The biggest egregious failure in color blind friendly design had to be the map 'Burial Mounds' and it became the basis for a famous game type that I have decided to call "let's screw Justin." If you aren't familiar with the map, it's a big, washed out brown map full of brown floors and brown walls and brown rocks. So for happy fun time we at one point decided to do green team vs. brown team on this map and it created the perfect storm of colors. The result: essentially everyone was invisible, even at close range. It was like playing with everyone else having Active Camo but me, and it was hilarious... for about 17 seconds. This did not get played all the time, but for the rest of our Halo 2 LAN party career it became a running joke and was frequently suggested as a game type, much to my chagrin. And still to this day, even though we dont all play games like we used to, I can imagine people would not hesitate to suggest it when we bust out an old game. 

I'm really excited to see more an more companies adding color blind modes to help us out, but it is still a problem in the industry as a whole. I plan on telling more of these stories over time, they seem entertaining to me, maybe I can get some laughs and address some issues. Next time: How I spent a decade thinking something was brown, how it turned out to be green, and how it BLEW MY F@#%*& MIND!