If you wanna play Halo 1 (and possibly the rest of the etiginal Halo Trilogy if they remake Halo 2 & 3) on PC/Xbox in 2026, you have 2 choices:

1. Spend $50 USD to pay for a UE5 remake of Halo 1 by a disguised 343 Industries (Halo Studios), where you only get the campaign with tweaks that are controversial (i.e. sprint, or skins IN A SINGLE-PLAYER GAME), the game having many changes from the original, and the voice acting being recast, sounding off in the process. The game also runs on UE5, which is at best a resource-demanding engine, and often an unoptimized mess.

2. Spend $40 USD to pay for Halo MCC, which not only gets you a port of a remaster of Halo 1 that lets you switch to the classic graphics and is basically the full original game (including multiplayer), but you also get the rest of Bungie's Halo games and Halo 4, and you get steam workshop support for all of the games in the collection. It also will work on many more computers, since the latest game in the collection was made for the Xbox One, which is almost 13 years old, meaning your PC will be able to run it.

If I had to make this choice in 2026, I would be getting Halo MCC 10 times out of 10, as I'm not paying $10 USD more for a modern recreation of a classic that only contains half of the content of the original when I can get a version of the game that is comparatively near-identical to the original release from 2001 for $10 less, and get the rest of Bungie's halo games and one arguably mid Halo game for 4/5ths the price of the modern remake.


Am I being too harsh on Halo 1's remake? Probably, but Halo 1 (and Halo as a whole) deserves a better remake than what we got. I saw its announcement and was immediately not interested, as I already had the original, and I was not interested paying for a game I already own a version of, especially when the remake makes changes like adding sprint & Brutes to a game that never had either of them, reuses Halo Infinite's assets & artstyle rather than recreate Halo 1's artstyle, all of which make it feel less like a celebration of the original and more like 343i/Microsoft/Halo Studios retconning Halo 1. Granted Halo 1 Anniversary (the version of Halo 1 in MCC) also reused Halo Reach's assets & artstyle, but at least you can switch to the original graphics mid-game by pressing tab/select in Halo 1 Anniversary, allowing you to re-experience the original game in a much more faithful manner. As a result, I do not intend to ever get the 2026 Halo 1 Remake that just came out (at the time of writing), as it offers nothing for me that MCC can't provide. If Microsoft decides to make more Halo remakes in the style/method of Halo 1's 2026 remake, I'm pretty sure they'll make the same type of changes that they made with Halo 1's remake, as 343 Industries/Halo Studios has never really been able to make a good Halo-adjacent experience without managing to botch something major along the way. If the remake had been more faithful to the original, and if it wasn't priced at $50 USD, I would have possibly considered buying it.

TL,DR: If you wanna get Halo 1, get the MCC. You get the definitive version of Halo 1, the rest of Bungie's Halo games & Halo 4 for $10 USD less than the 2026 remake.