Back in November 2001, Halo was the hot new FPS and Tom Cruise used his connections to get tips and tricks directly from the source. The original Xbox's launch, which celebrates its 20-year anniversary in 2021, was defined by Bungie's shooter. Not only did the quality of the game make the Xbox make sense as a console all on its own, but it also squashed the now quaint notion that first-person games didn't work on the couch with a controller. The Master Chief's adventures built a franchise that's still very important to Microsoft's gaming efforts, and it's hard to explain just how unlikely that seemed in the lead-up to the console's release.
Originally, Halo was going to be a Mac shooter in the tradition of Bungie's previous games, Myth and Marathon. It was even famously shown off by Steve Jobs himself as one of Apple's premiere games, but Microsoft preceded to buy the developer and transfer the game to the Xbox as a launch title. It sat among an eclectic selection of games that included Oddworld: Munch’s Oddysee, Project Gotham Racing, and the first game to ever wield the Shrek license. Still, Halo (now with its Microsoft-approved Combat Evolved subtitle) was the game that everyone was talking about.
As revealed in an expansive look at the original Xbox's launch on Bloomberg, Tom Cruise was among those who purchased an Xbox early on and he got Halo: Combat Evolved along with it. Bungie co-founder Alex Seropian was the one to reveals this fact, as he had a first-hand experience with the Holywood star's struggles getting through the campaign.
"Every sort of additional cultural touch point that it achieved was like an oh-my-gosh kind of thing. I remember Tom Cruise’s assistant calling us up looking for some for some help for Tom Cruise with beating a level."
There's no word in the article on if Tom ever mastered The Pillar of Autumn, but the fact that the game was even on the radar of a movie star in 2001 was a notch in Xbox's belt.
The days of the original Xbox were a simpler time, and Halo: Combat Evolved paved the way for many of the shooter trends that are still going in the modern age. Because Xbox Live launched the year after the console's debut, the original Halo was known as the game that launched a thousand LAN parties. Console gaming centers sprouted up organically in order to support the game's popularity among high school and college students, and that popularity grew immensely with the release of Halo 2. That game's online support, including the introduction of easy matchmaking and a party system, defined the online multiplayer experience in the same way that Super Mario 64 instructed designers on how to make 3D platforming a reality.
Nowadays, it wouldn't really be news that Tom Cruise was into an FPS like Halo, as games have grown into a massive industry that dwarfs Hollywood at times. In fact, it's possible that moviegoers in 2004 may have seen a trailer for Halo 2 in theaters and then immediately watched Tom Cruise in the Michael Mann crime film Collateral. The Internet made that sort of advertising seem less than cost-effective for many game publishers, but there was a brief moment where Xbox's biggest game was making just as many headlines for its blockbuster marketing campaign as it was for its iterations on the Combat Evolved formula. If given the choice, I'm sure many developers working on Halo Infinite in the now would love to go back to those good old days.
Source: Bloomberg