First Offensive

First Offensive

First Offensive was an Ascendancy Studio’s pitch to Microsoft to make a PC companion to what eventually became Halo Wars. It was well-recieved, but concerns among Microsoft higher-ups that PC products would take market share away from the potential of the console RTS release led to it being shelved.

It also didn’t help that Bungie had been completely unaware of the licensing conversations, a commonplace issue at the time.

First Offensive was my first professional game dev experience, and Microsoft graciously allowed the team to release the vertical slice as a free mod in 2011, seven years after its conception.

First Offensive was built on the Alamo RTS engine, built by former members of Westwood Studios (Command and Conquer) Michael Legg among others. Their new studio Petroglyph licensed the engine in 2004 and announced their first title, Empire at War, in 2005.

Download: https://www.moddb.com/mods/halo-first-offensive

Credits

I was originally hired on as a concept art intern, and worked my way up to Tech Art Director by release.

Reviews

Reception was generally positive, with fans bringing favorite concept art to events for the devs to sign.