Halo was released on November 15th, 2001 by Bungie. One of the first records of someone speedrunning Halo was by someone named Åstro the Space Duck on the Halo Bungie Forums, where he posted some of his times in beating some of the levels in the campaign. A couple of years after its release, Bungie decided to hold a speedrunning competition in 2004, where people competed to beat specific levels of Halo CE on Legendary as fast as possible. The fastest runners would then be given a prize for their achievements. Some of them ended up being notable people which have been a big influence on the community in the future, including Goatrope and Cody Miller. Bungie then released the runs once the event was over in August of 2004, with the winning videos featured on their site here. Bungie also released a highlight video on the coolest strategies, glitches, and gameplay that are featured here. The sum of the times for each level of the game added up to be a total time of 2:15:16.
One of the winning entries from Going Nowhere Fast by Goatrope
The next couple years, a lot of the history of Halo speedrunning was not well documented. Primarily due to lack of resources in ability to save many videos and keep things online. One such instance is the first website dedicated to speedrunning Halo, High Speed Halo, which has had its domain taken and very little of the old archived data on the site was saved. Some of the older times for all of the games, including some videos can be found in this spreadsheet which was another way that the older runners have kept their records.
Cody Miller's AGDQ 2011 Run
In 2011, Halo made its first appearance at Games Done Quick, one of the most popular speedrunning events worldwide which had Cody Miller run Halo CE on the first day of the event. This run ended up being a disaster, resulting in one of the worst showcases ever done at GDQ. Cody Miller ended up not only completing the game in four hours with an estimated two hour time, but also had to drop down from Legendary to Heroic, and then from Heroic to Normal difficulty throughout the run. While it was not entirely his fault due to him having to run multiple games and a very weird schedule for GDQ, it put Halo in a dark light. Cody Miller was found in the future to have doctored runs by splicing them together as if they were one run.
slYnki and scurty's first segmented run of Halo CE Legendary
During this time, slYnki and scurty, two runners of the community, had made the first segmented run of Halo CE on Legendary. A segmented run is one where people purposely cut specific segments of the game together to create a full playthrough of a game as if played to perfection for the knowledge at the time. In this run, they were able to complete the game in 1:16:43, which is an astounding time for this era.
After a couple more years, Halo CE ended up being featured on GDQ again by Goatrope after Monopoli's successful Halo 2 run as a second chance for the community. This run was phenomenal and ended up being one of the major parts that has ended up redeeming the Halo community. He ended up with a strong sub-two hour run, clocking in at 1:51:19, and thus Halo speedrunning was back once again.
Goatrope's SGDQ 2014 Run
Both Monopoli and Goatrope's runs ended up inspiring many people to get on board with Halo speedrunning, yet High Speed Halo was not doing its job in keeping up with the community due to its inability to function. One of the world record holders at the time, sub_WHISTLE, was considering quitting due to these issues. This led to the creation of Halo Runs, a new site that would eventually take over High Speed Halo, and has now amassed over 1,000 runners.
Its creation also led to some new rules and other updates to the community that were necessary, especially since before, the organization of how these rules were set were sloppy. Eventually each game had a set start and end spot for timing, consolidated categories so only easy and legendary were to be featured on the site, and a lot of things concerning external assistance and what was and wasn't allowed.
Halo CE Done Segmented on Legendary in 1:07:04
In 2014, many new runners pushed Halo CE forwards with optimization and new strategies. One of these runners was Khan, who started grinding out Two Betrayals, one of the toughest levels on Legendary, eventually getting a world record by minutes with super aggressive strategies. Goatrope also ended up finding flood bumping on Library, when he discovered that shooting the flood causes it to down itself, and revive, pushing him through a door where you normally have to wait for to open. This ended up creating many new tricks using the flood to bump, creating Keyes bump and Maw bump as well in the process.
The Halo community then decided to continue to push on and create a new segmented run with all of the new strats and knowledge, this time, done by scurty, desksol, sub_WHISTLE, and vetroxity, some of the top runners at the time. After a long amount of work, in was released in February 2015, with a time of 1:07:04.
In 2017, GarishGoblin, the Legendary World Record Holder, ran Halo CE at GDQ, with a phenomenal time of 1:26:04. Garish's run ended up being another major influence in the Halo CE community, bringing in many more runners, and is still the current world record holder today.
GarishGoblin's SGDQ 2017 Run
As of now, the community is as active as ever, with new tricks even being discovered as recently as January 2020. For a game that is nearing twenty years old and still finding major new skips, it is quite impressive. It is not stopping here as well, since Halo: The Master Chief Collection is releasing Halo CE on PC sometime around March or April of 2020, which is bound to bring much more activity to the game.