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It’s official — Halo: Combat Evolved is getting a full-blown remake for the current generation, and somehow, the even bigger news is that it will be coming to PlayStation. In fact, if rumors are to be believed, then remakes of the second and third Halo game are also on the way, which would make this a second resurrection of the series that came to define modern console FPS design. I honestly couldn’t be happier, because Halo has truly earned that reverence by shaping an entire generation of gamers, setting the gold standard for multiplayer shooters, and giving Xbox its soul (and its games).

Still, while we celebrate Master Chief’s return, I can’t help but look back at a few other shooters from that same golden age, which were every bit as inventive, gutsy, and ahead of their time, but still slipped into obscurity. I’m not talking purely out of nostalgia here, but these forgotten legends do deserve the Halo: Campaign Evolved treatment, or even half of it, honestly.

Project I.G.I.: I’m Going In (2000)

It’s a shame we never got the promised Unreal Engine 5 sequel

Before stealth shooters like Ghost Recon, Sniper Elite, and *Splinter Cell *became household names, it was *Project I.G.I. *that was already doing the impossible by combining tactical stealth with the realism of large-scale military infiltration. That opening mission in the first *I.G.I. *game is still the stuff of legends as you invade a train yard compound and take down guards one by one. This was one of those games that every PC gamer’s cousin or friend swore was “impossible to finish,” myself included.

Beneath the punishing difficulty of the merciless alarms and the malicious lack of checkpoints, what *Project I.G.I. *did have something ahead of its time. The massive outdoor maps, the sniping mechanics, and the focus of gadgets were all precursors to the modern tactical shooter experience. Honestly, the AI was heavily leaning towards the “early 2000s jank” side of things, and the story was pretty paper-thin, too, but a modern remake? That could transform *I.G.I. *into the stealth-action hybrid it always wanted to be. It’s an absolute and utter shame that the modern I.G.I. Origins, which would be built on Unreal Engine 5, was announced all the way back in 2019, and yet, six years later, there’s no sign of it at all. The studio, sadly, shut down a year after announcing Origins, and its parent company stated that the project simply didn’t have enough traction to go on.

Systems

Released December 8, 2000

Developer(s) Innerloop Studios

Publisher(s) Eidos Interactive

Think your way in...shoot your way out!

Set in post-Soviet Russia in a time of corruption and blackmail. You take on the role of David Llewelyn Jones, an ex SAS soldier who has been sent on a black Ops mission to capture a stolen US nuclear weapon and prevent a second Chernobyl disaster.

Project IGI: I’m Going In encompasses all the excitement of a first person shoot’em up coupled with the realism, adrenaline and stealth of being an authentic soldier.

TimeSplitters deserves a major comeback, yesterday

The original two games, remade together, could do serious numbers

Halo gave us the heroic blueprint for console shooters, but it was TimeSplitters that really gave us the soul. This was a launch title for the PlayStation 2, and it was ‘the’ anti-serious shooter. Fast, colorful, and absolutely brimming with creativity and a personality of its own, this game had the spirit of GoldenEye 007 and that of Perfect Dark (god, I really wanted that remake). Plus, it had something even more magical that has become an absolute rarity today — split-screen magic.

*TimeSplitters *never took itself too seriously, making you jump between timelines, fighting in cyberpunk nightclubs, 1930s mansions, and heck, even alien space stations. Every map in the game felt unique, and its level editor meant that you yourself could build the madness yourself. It’s the first game that came to my mind two years ago when I played *Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart *on my PC for the first time.

So now, imagine the visuals (and loading times) of Rift Apart, with *TimeSplitters *being the IP. This is a game that practically screams “remake me!” With a full co-op campaign, online multiplayer, and maybe even a modern map-creation suite thrown in for good measure. It would be the perfect antidote to the hyper-serious shooters of today, and if marketed right, could very well become one of the most unique FPS in the modern landscape.

Systems

Released October 23, 2000

ESRB T For Teen // Blood, Language, Violence

Developer(s) Free Radical Design

Publisher(s) Eidos Interactive

Multiplayer Local Multiplayer

Medal of Honor: Underground (2000)

A surprisingly cinematic affair for its time

*Medal of Honor *is a franchise that has known struggle for most of its life, with middling reviews and games that simply didn’t stick the landing. To its credit, it kept trying hard until the PS3/Xbox 360 era with Warfighter, and then simply relegated itself to VR territory after that. However, this was the nameplate in the first-person shooter space, and the definitive World Sar II shooter, well before *Call of Duty *arrived on the scene to become a household name.

Medal of Honor: Underground was the second game in the franchise, and it improved everything from the first game. As a female protagonist all the way back in 2000, you battled Nazis in occupied Europe, and had to utilize stealth and sabotage to get ahead, too. The game focused on the unsung heroes of the war, and even back in 2000, it pushed the PS1 to its absolute limits with its cinematic tone. And if you don’t know, it was Michael Giacchino who gave the orchestral score to the game, making *Medal of Honor: Underground *a rather fantastic title to look back at, 25 years later.

I know the series has completely fizzled out, but if there’s only one game in the entire franchise that deserves another shot, it has to be Underground. A remake could give it the attention it never got, and remind a new generation that first-person shooters can tell powerful human stories, especially since the latest-and-greatest aren’t doing it.

Systems

Released October 23, 2000

ESRB t // Animated Violence

Publisher(s) EA

Engine Unreal Engine

Multiplayer Local Multiplayer

Franchise Medal of Honor

Soldier of Fortune (2000) is highly unlikely, I know

This one is perhaps the biggest pipe dream

This one’s not for the faint of heart. *Soldier of Fortune *was unapologetically brutal, gory, and rather controversial. At the same time, though, it was also one of the most technically ambitious shooters of its time. Before its *COD *days, Raven Software introduced a dismemberment system in the Soldier of Fortune games called GHOUL, and it allowed unprecedented realism in how enemies reacted to gunfire.

As a mercenary, you went through some of the world’s terrorist hotspots, armed with an arsenal of heavy and dangerous weapons. A remake today would have to walk a fine line between honoring its unapologetic roots and updating its tone for modern sensibilities, with a lot of landmines to avoid vis-à-vis the narrative it wants to share, but Soldier of Fortune does truly deserve that second chance. It wasn’t just its shock value that made the game so popular at the time. It was one of the first games to ever truly make you feel the impact of every bullet you fired, and that alone warrants, at the very least, a modern remake. Of course, Raven now being part of Activision, and Call of Duty being their only in-house cash cow in the FPS space, this is a rather far-fetched idea.

Released March 29, 2000

Platform(s) PC, Sega Dreamcast

F.E.A.R. (2005) could still carve out a niche of its own

The world needs some psychological horror FPS action

This is the one that I really, really want. When *F.E.A.R. *launched back in 2005, it felt like a genre collision that no one saw coming. It was going to be a half-Japanese horror fever dream, and half John Woo action flick. The game blended intense slow-motion gunfights with psychological horror, and the atmospheric storytelling, especially for my toddler self, was something I’d never seen.

However, *F.E.A.R. *wasn’t just about flashy physics and horror. It was oppressive. That office-building horror, the eerie silence before Alma would appear and whisper in the back of your ear, the flickering lights that made your grip on the mouse tighten even more — it all made for a cinematic horror experience in traditional FPS form. Plus, even the game’s enemy AI was rather remarkable, communicating, coordinating, and flanking the player in ways we’d never seen before. With all that going for it, and then some, F.E.A.R. did lose its edge eventually when it leaned too hard on the action side of things — a mistake the Dead Space franchise made as well.

And yet, the 2023 remake of *Dead Space *was every bit as perfect as a modern remake could be, and that’s the exact treatment that F.E.A.R. deserves as well.

It wasn’t Halo alone that defined an entire generation

Wild risks and weird experiments from studios carved out a space that Halo eventually ruled.

I know it’s easy to think of *Halo *as the one FPS that defined an entire generation of the early 2000s, and that’s majorly true, too. Still, that entire era wasn’t special just on the shoulders of Halo’s success alone, but rather the ecosystem around it. Studios took wild risks and did weird experiments, carving out a space that *Halo *eventually stood on top of.

If *Halo: Campaign Evolved *is proof that legends can be reborn (again and again), then maybe, just maybe, these forgotten shooters deserve their own rebirths too. Not for nostalgia’s sake alone, but to remind everyone what it felt like to play an FPS that meant something.