FWIW, the guy who made this (Ed Fries) was the VP at Microsoft who oversaw game publishing for the original Xbox product cycle, which I assume explains the choice of Halo. He was one of the VPs who worked up from the technical ranks, not a pure business guy, but I still wouldn't have expected him to be writing asm. Pretty impressive.
A few posts down from the link, the author of the game describes how he came about writing it. It's a great window into the game creator's process of working, and a very good read.
It's around this time that I discovered the existence of what I call "Magic Land". I was working on a bug with the boss encounter and accidentally found myself completely outside the 64 room map. I was wandering through memory that was never intended to be interpreted as part of the map but the code was doing the best it could to interpret what was being thrown at it. Strange, misshapen monsters attacked me in even stranger ways as I wandered through this bizarre land that I had unintentionally created. I left a bug or two in the final game to allow others to find and explore this strange landscape as I did.
Off Topic:
The ZX Specturm (also an 8 Bit machine like the Atart 2600) is still very popular and the community has made some great mods, e.g. the divIDE (an extension to hook up IDE devices).
Also the community still does games and tools for it.
Lately someone made an ethernet hack, and you can even twitter from the specccy. Amazing stuff.
BR
I hope they decide to sell cartridges for this. My original 2600 is still working after all these years, although it gets more challenging every year to hook it up to the TV as the connectors lag further and further behind. Anyone makeing a game/tv switch for hdmi? :)
