You can now play the original Halo for free in your browser with 128-player multiplayer

Credit: Michaell Hynes Published Sep 30, 2026, 4:38 PM EDT Patrick O'Rourke is XDA's News Editor and Entertainment Segment Lead. Previously, he was Pocket-lint's Editor-in-Chief, the Editor-in-Chief of Canadian tech publication MobileSyrup, and earlier in his career, he worked as the technology editor at the Financial Post and Postmedia. He's based in Toronto. Over the past 15 years, he's written thousands of articles. Patrick has also interviewed dozens of tech industry executives and covered GDC, E3, Gamescom, WWDC, Apple keynotes, Samsung Unpacked events and more. Patrick has a BA in journalism from Toronto Metropolitan University. Sign in to your XDA account Summary An unofficial browser port of Halo: Combat Evolved supports 128-player multiplayer and split-screen co-op. The game runs poorly on iOS and Android, and PC is recommended for best performance. The port had 20K plays in 5 hours across 115 countries. To say that the Halo series has struggled over the past few years would be a significant understatement. In fact, the iconic franchise has faced so many issues that Microsoft recently basically shut down Halo Studios (formerly 343 Industries) and handed over the series' development to Activision. On the plus side, you can now play Halo: Combat Evolved for free in your web browser with 128-player split-screen co-op and multiplayer, courtesy of X user @michellhynes (Michaell Hynes) (via Gamingbible). Yes, you read that correctly. That said, Hynes still considers the multiplayer feature "untested." Hynes also says his very unofficial browser port of Halo: Combat Evolved doesn't run well on iOS or Android, and that playing it on a PC is the best route. Still, it's impressive the 26-year-old game runs in a browser at all, and given I consider Halo: Combat Evolved one of my favorite video games ever, it's a bit of a trip to see it running in a browser. Unsurprisingly, this unofficial OG Halo port is pretty popular It's likely it won't be online for very long Hynes says that in the browser port's first five hours online, nearly 20,000 instances of the game were played across 115 countries, with an average of 94fps. It works pretty smoothly, though. In the few minutes I played the browser port of Halo Combat: Evolved, the experience was surprisingly solid, though I did run into a very brief bit of lag. You'll also need to wait for certain parts of the game to download before you can keep playing. I haven't tried the experimental multiplayer mode yet, but I'm looking forward to testing it out soon (I've heard good things about it, though). Credit: Michaell Hynes It's worth noting that you can't use a controller to play the game right now, so you're stuck with mouse and keyboard controls (it's unclear whether Hynes plans to add this feature in the future). If you're interested in trying this very unofficial port of Halo: Combat Evolved, you can find it at this link. Of course, this port likely won't be around for long, and Microsoft's army of lawyers will eventually catch up with Hynes and his project, especially given the recent launch of Halo: Campaign Evolved, a pretty solid Unreal Engine 5 remake of Combat Evolved for PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X/S. With this in mind, if you're interested in trying out the browser port of Halo: CE, it's a good idea to take it for a spin soon.