People discover exploits in videos games all the time. Sometimes a small community of “trickers” will form around these exploits. These communities are usually obscure and remain so until they dwindle away. However, the Halo tricking community managed to shake the relative obscurity of most tricking communities and thrived for many years. In fact, a lot of Halo tricking videos have as many YouTube views as some of your favorite musician’s music videos. What made this whole thing interesting wasn’t necessarily the exploits themselves, but the phenomenon and philosophy behind it.

In 2004, a small group of HBO forum members began to collaborate with Jeremy Hunt aka ‘Ducain’ to create High Impact Halo, which would become the biggest Halo tricking website. It started out small but gained a lot of popularity after the release of Halo 2. High Impact Halo was being talked about by well-known gaming magazines and even mentioned in an article on Wired News. During the summer following the release of Halo 2, High Impact Halo’s traffic spiked to over 3 million page views a day, which was spectacular for a tricking website. This explosion of interest broke Halo tricking out of its obscurity and a philosophy began to emerge around it.

The idea is simple. Imagine doing something incredible in a video game, something that’s seemingly impossible. Now, figure out how to do it! It doesn’t matter how hard it is or how long it might take, just do it! Put your willpower, creativity, and intuition to the test and see if you can actually perform this seemingly impossible task. Push yourself and the concept to the limit. That’s the beauty of it, to push the limits and to make the seemingly impossible possible. Most importantly, have fun with it all.

If you’re curious about the lengths to which people were willing to take this concept, look no further than the infamous Tower to Tower (T2T) challenge, which Kotaku covered after its completion. The idea was very simple, launch a player from one tower to another on the Halo: Combat Evolved map “Halo.” Sounds simple enough, but for many years people considered the challenge impossible. Countless people tried and failed to conquer this long-standing challenge. Many collaborated and exchanged ideas on how to overcome this seemingly impossible task, but continued to fail. Finally, after 7 years, a long-time tricker by the alias of “Duelies” completed the challenge. It was a true testament to the concept and philosophy of Halo tricking.

So, why does any of this matter? Well, I think everyday people could learn something from this phenomenon and the philosophy behind it. Personally, being a part of the Halo tricking community inspired me to push myself to the limits and dare to dream of the impossible. Even after all of these years, I’ve kept that philosophy in the back of my mind and use it to propel myself forward. I challenge you to do the same. Just imagine something seemingly impossible that you want to accomplish in your life and do it. It doesn’t matter how hard it is or how long it might take, just do it!

— SRL