It’s time to break back out your old copy of Halo: Combat Evolved that almost made you fail college. The multiplayer edition is live once more..
For gameplay to work online, it need to be hosted on servers. Usually those servers are expensive to maintain. Once a game gets too old, those servers are shut off. That’s generally the case, but when a game is as popular and ubiquitous as the first Halo, it still has legs 13 years after its release—even with the recent release of Halo 4 Xbox 360.
GameSpy was acting as the main server to host the PC version of Halo: Combat Evolved. On Feb. 21, Ziff Davis, the American publisher that owns GameSpy, shut down the company. On May 31, the services portion of GameSpy will shutter, therefore games like Halo: Combat Evolved will lose their primary host.
Fans were distraught to hear the news, but they can now take a sigh of relief. GameRanger will be stepping in to take over the Halo: Combat Evolved servers. That means fans can continue to play the classic, hopefully for years to come.
GameRanger isn’t new to the business of providing free hosting for games that lost server support. The Australian company took on the burden of hosting GRID’s online multiplayer and Need for Speed: Most Wanted.
There is some bad news, though. Since GameSpy hosted 800 different games, some of those games will most likely be cut from online existence. Fans of Crysis and Crysis 2 currently lack an angel benefactor to host their games, and they’re petitioning EA, the game’s publisher, to pick-up support for the aging shooters.
EA, Activision, Epic Games, Bohemia Interactive, and Gearbox said that it will continue to support the online ecosystems of some of their games after GameSpy’s shutdown.
Screengrab via Xbox
