Halo 5: Guardians review – a competent campaign, but the multiplayer makes it

This sprawling sci-fi series once set the agenda for console shooters, but now far behind and playing catch up, it has much to prove

Master Chief was first introduced to the world, not by Microsoft, but by Apple. In 1999, Steve Jobs paced the Macworld Conference stage proclaiming that the video-game footage he was about to show was the "coolest" he'd seen. The lights dimmed and Halo's melancholic choral refrain sounded in the background. Chief padded on to the screen behind Jobs, a symbol of Apple's nascent gaming ambitions.

It was not to be. Within a year, the space marine, his game and Bungie, the company behind it all, were sold to Microsoft. Two years later, Halo launched alongside Microsoft's Xbox console, a piece of hardware that was seen as a folly from a company that had no business in video games beyond flight sims and solitaire. The game, Microsoft hoped, would legitimise the machine. It worked. The company has sold more than 65m Halo games, and almost as many Xbox consoles on which to play them.