In an interview with CVG, Saber Interactive's Matthew Karch explained how his team managed to convince Microsoft how they could stay true to the original Halo and satisfy the tastes of demanding Halo fans.
"It was definitely our technology and the solution we came up with [that persuaded Microsoft]. One of the things Microsoft said is they needed the gameplay to be exact. Halo fans are extremely exacting and the gameplay couldn't be changed.", Karch told CVG.
"We came up with a way to do that and preserve the gameplay. I think we've mentioned this and it's public but we took the Bungie engine and we plugged it into ours, so the game itself is running in the original Bungie code but the rendering of the world and the engine is ours, so we basically took the game scripting and AI and plugged it in., he continued.
"If you drew a circle you can picture the original Bungie engine fully within the circle of our engine, almost like a wrapper. My partner Andre came up with that idea, we gave them a demo very quickly and said 'hey look, you can toggle'. That's something that Dan Ayoub from Microsoft really wanted, the toggle feature; he wanted to switch between classic and new. We showed them that and they we're like 'holy shit, ok'." Karch concluded.
It will be interesting to see just how it all comes together in Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary this November.