It was a self-sustained ecosystem of community created content. With Bungie’s final game in the series, Halo: Reach, a file browser for maps, modes, films, and screenshots made user-generated content more accessible than ever. If you were particularly lucky, your screenshot might have even made it into Bungie Favourites – showing up in everybody’s main menu. Recorded content and screenshots taken with Theatre can then be saved and uploaded to a player’s File Share, an easily accessed profile feature that anybody in a pre-game lobby can view. In this mode, the player can fast-forward, rewind, pause, detach the camera, record gameplay, and take screenshots.
Theatre mode in Halo 3 is always silently processing every match you play – across the campaign, multiplayer, custom games, and even the Forge map editor mode – and saves your interaction with the game which the player can access at any time. This feature found its way into the highly-anticipated sequel as ‘Theatre’ and became one of the game’s primary outlets for user-generated content. During the development of Halo 2, Bungie were looking to implement a ‘saved films’ feature that didn’t make the final cut. It wasn’t until 2007, when a little-known indie game called Halo 3 came along, that photo mode evolved. As revolutionary as this was at the time, it was burdened by the limitations of online gaming being in its infancy, with few-to-no options for sharing content. This early form of the mode allowed players to take shots of their cars on a track or at various specific locations, which the player could then transfer to a USB device. It wasn’t until Gran Turismo 4 released in 2005 (a game that we at Universally Speaking actually supported) that the words ‘photo mode’ would actually appear. Of course, ‘back in the day’ we relied on PC mods to do this. It’s a novelty that never wears thin, being able to detach the camera from the fixed viewpoint of our character and explore vast landscapes and worlds with very different eyes. In recent years, I have come to use the word “shoot” in games to refer to taking a screenshot about as much as I have to refer to the use of a weapon… This week, we look at some of the history of this increasingly popular feature and why it’s one of the best things to happen to the gaming industry. Of the many great innovations in video games over the years, one of the best has undeniably been the boom in the number of games featuring photo mode.
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