Halo content for modern-day modders

gamedeveloper.com:

343 Industries has announced that it's embarked on an ambitious partnership with the Halo modding community to resurrect archived and dummied-out Halo content for Halo: The Master Chief Collection (on PC). Said content includes unused assets from Halo: Combat Evolved, the Halo 2 2003 E3 demo, and assets created for the Mac-exclusive version of Halo that debuted at MacWorld in 1998.

This move follows a years-long archival effort from senior franchise writer Kenneth Peters, who had been recovering files from a file named "\share\Halo1" over the last few years. He writes that after a recent return from Budapest, he and publishing team member Sean Cooper began a more dedicated effort to restore archival game files, and the result has been a number of still-usable game assets from the early days of Halo history.

With the help of an NDA-bound modding team, Peters and company were able to quickly get cut vehicles from Halo: Combat Evolved working by way of the Halo: CE Editing Kit. This is because the vehicles were archived with near-retail tags that were fully compatible with the Editing Kit.

Seeing the working vehicles running in Halo again apparently lit a fire at 343 Industries, and the modding team was brought fully onboard to restore a wide variety of archived Halo content under the name "Digsite." The results are astounding for fans of both game history and Halo alike.

As mentioned before, the primary assets recovered for Halo: Combat Evolved include a host of vehicles, including the alien hovering tank Spectre, a flying human vehicle called the Kestrel, and a "stealth tank" that's been renamed as "The Viper."

These aren't the only vehicles from the Halo archives, but they are the ones that the team was able to get working