Halo 2’s E3 Demo From May 2003 Has Leaked Online, And Here’s A Look At Some Footage

Bungie’s Halo 2 unsurprisingly proved a smash hit when it arrived on the original Xbox in November 2004, but over a year prior to that, the company showed off the game at June’s E3 2003 event.

To mark the appearance, the company built a special E3 demo that would mark the first gameplay footage of Halo 2 to be seen by the public, and a May 2003 build — specifically from the 3rd and the 11th — has suddenly leaked online.

As you can see from the video above (both in the tweet and the YouTube clip), some Halo fans have been eagerly checking this out for themselves over the past couple of days, playing through the test levels and watching the early version of Sergeant Johnson’s speech introducing the first glimpse of Halo 2 gameplay.

Now, we’re not going to share where you can get this for yourself (we assume the leak wasn’t authorised, and there’s no guarantee the files aren’t infected either), but if you fancy checking out a more modern version of the Halo 2 E3 demo, a mod was officially released on Steam last year that integrated it into Halo: The Master Chief Collection.

And finally, we’ll drop a YouTube video below that shows what the E3 2003 demo looked like when it was actually shown off in-person at the event. The hype was real, and Halo 2 didn’t disappoint!