Fans are rebuilding Halo themselves: 64-player Halo 3, Halo 5 on PC and the original everywhere

2026-10-07 · Project Reclaimer, Halo 5 Reforged, OpenCE and more

Officially, Halo has had a rough few years. Halo Infinite never became the long-running platform it was meant to be, and according to XDA the series' development has now passed from Halo Studios to Activision. Unofficially, it's having one of its busiest months ever. In the space of a few weeks, fans have shipped a native port of the original game, a souped-up Halo 3 launcher and serious progress on bringing Halo 5 to PC. Below: what each project is and what you need to play it.

Project Reclaimer: Halo 3 for 64 players

Project Reclaimer is a free, standalone Windows launcher for Halo 3. It loads the game from your own Halo: The Master Chief Collection install and replaces MCC's menus with its own, so you never open MCC itself. The headline feature is size: Halo 3 was built for 16 players, and Reclaimer runs games of up to 64, as two teams of 32 or one big free-for-all.

The rest of the feature list reads like a wish list from 2008:

Community-run dedicated servers and a server browser, so the game doesn't depend on official servers
Mods that download automatically when you join a server that uses them
Map and mode voting in the lobby before each match
Four-player split screen that works online, on one PC
Campaign co-op for up to 16 players, plus campaign mods from the Steam Workshop
An expanded Forge: version 0.9.5 added multi-object selection, prefabs, snapping, undo, lights and per-map gravity

It's early software. The developers ask players to expect bugs, the source is private for now (the stated plan is to open it later), and the team says it isn't trying to be a faithful copy of the 2007 release: it changes whatever plays better today. Because it only runs on a Master Chief Collection you've bought, there's no game data in the download.

Halo 5 Reforged: the whole game on PC

Halo 5: Guardians never left the Xbox One. The closest PC players got was Halo 5: Forge, the free Windows 10 map editor from 2016. Halo 5 Reforged starts from Forge: it's a community-written PC runtime built around it, adapted to load Halo 5 content you supply from your own copy. The goal is all of it: campaign, co-op, multiplayer, Warzone and Spartan customisation, with LAN and mod support later.

There is no public build yet. According to the project's site, all 15 campaign missions load into gameplay in development builds, two-player co-op works, the REQ pack store works, and Warzone Firefight is next. The team says the project is non-commercial: no sales, no donations, and no Microsoft files bundled with any release.

OpenCE: the original Halo, native on PC, Linux and Android

The project that started this run is a decompilation of the original Xbox Halo: Combat Evolved. OpenCE builds it into native programs for Windows, Linux and Android, with the full campaign and system-link games for up to 128 players across all three. You point it at a disc image of your own Xbox copy on first launch. We cover it in detail in our OpenCE write-up.

And a pre-release Halo 3

For the archaeologists, Halo 3 Delta Recomp is an experimental recompilation of a pre-release Halo 3 build. It's a curiosity, not a way to play the finished game.

Why “bring your own copy” matters

All four projects have one thing in common: none of them ship Microsoft's game data. You supply it from a copy you own, whether that's an Xbox disc image, an MCC install or Halo 5 files. That keeps the projects on firmer ground than ports that hand you the whole game, and it's also the rule for what FanGamesDB lists. Every Halo project we track is on the Halo series page.

Sources: projectreclaimer.dev, h5reforged.dev, OpenCE on GitHub, XDA.