Ancient Web: Jeff Keegan's 2002 Halo Fan Films Outgrew His Bandwidth

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.

A 440-megabyte gameplay movie is an ambitious thing to offer for download when many people still connect to the Internet through telephone modems. Jeff Keegan tried anyway.

Visit the Keegan family homepage

The front page, marked © 2002 Jonathan Keegan, opens into family branches: Jeff and Laurie's page, Jon Keegan, and Larry Keegan's writing about science. That small directory has a second, more specific story hidden inside it.

Jeff's Halo page is dated March 28 and March 31, 2002. Keegan writes about waiting for Bungie's Halo, watching Microsoft buy the developer, and buying an Xbox partly to play the game. Having logged time in Doom, Quake, and Unreal Tournament, he now wanted to show other fans what Halo could do.

Three days and hundreds of megabytes

The March 28 entry introduces a homemade movie named JeffsHaloFun_0.1_net.mov, approximately 60 MB. Three days later came JeffsHaloFun_0.2_net.mov, now around 440 MB and nearly 28 minutes long. It had better editing, Keegan says, but no soundtrack, and was still longer than he wanted.

He recommends downloading the file, going to lunch, and returning to watch it. The line is a small masterpiece of contemporary bandwidth awareness.

The page also lists older Halo trailers, including footage from E3 2000 and Macworld, plus a fan physics experiment called Warthog Jump. It records filenames in QuickTime and MPEG formats, not links to modern streaming playlists.

The most important update is above the list: bandwidth became a problem, so Keegan removed his homemade movies from the website. He left the text and filenames in case someone could find or mirror the files elsewhere. The surviving page documents the films' existence and their approximate size; it does not establish that those downloads remain functional.

Another personal resume page identifies Jeff Keegan as a software engineer and author of a 2002–2003 TiVo hacking book. That professional history helps explain the mix of home-technology tinkering and game fandom across the family site, without turning the Halo page into a commercial project.

The record captures the moment when enthusiastic amateurs could produce sizable game videos but could not necessarily afford to distribute them.

Read Jeff's original dated Halo notes and return to the Keegan family index.

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.