Hello everyone, and welcome to Halo Spotlight. The place where we shine a spotlight on Halo community creations. This piece is a Content Creator Q&A, a Q&A where we sit down with content creators and asked them some questions.
The Writing Spartan sat down with Neil, one of the members of Hidden Reach. Hidden Reach, AKA Team Mi Seng, have been well known in the Halo community for quite some time thanks to their hiding content, with them famously hiding in the 2016 Halo World Championship.
Like most of our Q&As, this Q&A was done via Discord, so if you’d like to hear the full audio version of this Q&A, you can do so on our YouTube channel.
This written version of the Q&A will be a shortened version of the full audio Q&A. Until the full version is released, please enjoy the shortened version below. We just want to pop a quick note that MCC means Halo: The Master Chief Collection, for those who may be unsure.
Question: For those who might not have heard of Hidden Reach, could you give us a bit of background on what Hidden Reach is?
“Basically we’re a group of Halo players with a YouTube channel. I’m just one. There’s probably about 15 active members at the moment. We’ve been around since 2009, and on and off have continued the whole time, with maybe a few breaks.
Our videos are mainly centred around hiding in Halo Matchmaking. We’ve done it right the way through from Halo 3, Halo Reach, Halo 4, took a break when MCC came out because it was kinda broken, Halo 5, and now we’ve come back to MCC before Infinite.
All our content is based around either hiding in matchmaking, or around any multiplayer tricks and glitches in Halo games. Mainly Halo 3 right now with a little bit of Reach and whatever else we find in MCC.”
Question: Hidden Reach, AKA Team Mi Seng has been around for quite some time. How does the group keep things fresh and entertaining in 2021?
“Basically we just look for whatever we ourselves enjoy, and people tend to like watching that. If we get bored of something, other people are probably getting bored of that as well, so we try and switch things up.
That’s why we don’t do Halo 5 anymore, cause we got bored of it. We’re back in MCC and it seems most of the Halo community is back in MCC too. We try and come up with new ways of editing our videos and keep it fresh.
There’s a lot of things that are kinda niche in those games (MCC) that not a lot of people know about, so that’s the kinda stuff we’re trying to get out before Infinite.”
Question: Hidden Reach was put together many years ago. How exactly was HiddenReach founded, and how did the name Team Mi Seng come about?
“So to begin with it wasn’t even Hidden Reach. There was a channel prior to Hidden Reach that led to Hidden Reach. I think it was late 2008 or 2009, It was called HLG Invincible. HLG Invincible was the original channel. None of the guys around now were really involved with that.
Eventually Halo Reach got announced, and they wanted a more relevant name, so they kinda rebooted. That’s when 3 of the current roster joined. Me, Porpo and Unfound. Not too long after that, the channel got passed onto us and the other guys stopped, so we basically took over from that point.
At the time it was meant to be the up to date name for the new game Reach. The Team Mi Seng thing, well, one of the things we wanted to do was to pull off a hide in an official Halo tournament, which ended up being one of the qualifiers for the 2016 Halo World Championships.
It was the Asia qualifiers, and none of us being from an Asian country, we wanted to get in but we didn’t know how. Team Mi Seng came about because we wanted a name that fitted. We looked up the Chinese alphabet and tried to make a hiding pun out of those, which ended up being Mi Seng for ‘Missing’.”
Question: What has the feedback been towards hiding content within the Halo Community?
“Very good actually, even though it is niche. Most of the people who do see it, I’d say 80%-90% react positively to it, and the rest are like F*** this. I find a lot of the people you hide against get interested in it and want to learn how you did it. That seems to be a how a lot of people get into it.
Quite often in MCC, you’ll hide on someone and they’ll type in chat or they’ll find you and say “Can you show me how?”. I think the reason a lot of people are okay with it is because you’re using in game mechanics to do stuff. The way we see it, the tools we use to do everything, the other team has, they just don’t know how.”
Question: Could we get some examples of some of the best and worst parts of creating hiding content over the years?
“The worst part was late Halo 5, when we’d done most of the stuff we’d wanna do. We started not enjoying it, and there were only a small amount of maps we wanted to do. So much time was spent trying to get out of maps and you were relying on luck.
The best part is kinda the same though. When you struggle so much and pull it off, that’s probably the best part.”
Question: What are the current and future goals for Hidden Reach?
“We don’t really have any massively set goals. Right now just trying to get to 10k subs on YouTube, as that’s our next millstone. Just trying to get the ball rolling and enjoy ourselves. When Infinite comes out we’ll see what happens and see what there is.”
Question: For those who want to find more from Hidden Reach, where should they go?
“The main place is our YouTube. Everything here is gonna be HiddenReach. The YouTube, the Twitter, and the odd time we also stream.”
A huge thank you to Neil for talking with The Writing Spartan. We sadly didn’t ask about bluepants5, so that will remain a mystery forever.
A reminder that this written Q&A is only a bite sized version of the full interview. We really recommend checking out the full Q&A below, and more of our Q&As on our YouTube channel.
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