Halo: Combat Evolved · Xbox · 2001 · 2–16 (4 split-screen per console, 4 consoles linked) players · LAN / Split-Screen
Sixteen players, four Xboxes, four televisions and a pile of Ethernet cable. Impractical, said the critics — and a generation carried their consoles to each other's houses anyway.
Halo: Combat Evolved launched in North America on 15 November 2001 as a launch title for the original Xbox, and its multiplayer supported between two and sixteen players. Up to four could play split-screen on a single console, and further players joined via the System Link feature, which allowed up to four Xboxes to be connected over a local Ethernet network — a maximum of sixteen combatants, across four televisions, on maps built large enough to hold them. Critics noted, accurately, that this was impractical. Reaching Halo's player ceiling required physically transporting four consoles and four televisions into one building, connecting them through a hub, and persuading sixteen people to turn up. Nobody had really done this on a console before, and there was no reason to believe anybody would. They did. The Halo LAN party became a defining social ritual of the early 2000s, and the game's enduring reputation rests substantially on it. The Xbox shipped without a functioning online service — Xbox Live did not arrive until 2002, and Halo never received official Live support — so the only way to play sixteen-player Halo was to make it a physical event. The inconvenience turned out to be the feature.
Halo's System Link is, by any reasonable usability standard, a terrible way to play a video game. It requires hardware nobody owns four of, cabling nobody has, physical labour, and coordination among sixteen people. Every one of those is a barrier, and the entire trajectory of online gaming since has been about removing exactly such barriers.
And yet the memories are extraordinarily durable, precisely because of the effort. A Halo LAN party was not something you did; it was something you organised, carrying a console across town, meeting people in a room, and spending a night with them. The friction created a social occasion, and the game became the reason for the occasion rather than the whole of it. Frictionless matchmaking gives you far more games and almost no evenings.
Halo's multiplayer sold Xboxes in a way no marketing campaign managed, and the mechanism was simple: four-player split-screen meant that any Xbox owner could turn three friends into people who had played Halo. Every session was a demonstration, and every demonstration was conducted by an enthusiast in their own living room rather than by a shop.
That is the deeper significance of System Link. Microsoft entered the console market in 2001 as an outsider with no franchises, no reputation and no goodwill, against Sony at the height of its dominance. What it had was one game that people would haul a large black box across a city to play together — and that turned out to be enough to establish a platform which is still running a quarter of a century later.