What is Halo Spotlight?
Halo Spotlight is a website created by the Halo community for the Halo community. As the name suggests, the site exists to feature the creations of the Halo community.
Whether it’s artwork, machinimas, props or pictures, if it’s Halo related, it’s worthy of a feature.
Halo Spotlight is a fan made website, and has no affiliation with the official Halo website, Xbox website or Microsoft website. We are not in any way partnered with Xbox, Microsoft or Halo Studios. For the official Halo site, please visit Halo Waypoint.
The History Of Halo Spotlight
Whilst Halo Spotlight as a website and brand was officially launched in 2021, the team as a whole have been operating under various projects and platforms since as far back as 2011.
The Facebook Era
In the late 2000s and early 2010s, Facebook was the hub for all things social. Facebook pages and Facebook groups were the place to be for all things community, with Halo being no exception. From 2011 to 2020, our team worked with and on over 30 Facebook Pages, and numerous groups, interacting with millions of Halo fans in that time.
Commissions by our team October 16th 2013
In 2013, the Halo Xbox One teaser trailer released to fans worldwide. With it came our team reducing our focus to more specific pages, such as one named ‘The Worlds First Poncho Chief’.
Along with the newly created cosplay, The Worlds First Poncho Chief page enabled us to host gamenights, giveaways, competitions and features. Over the course of the page’s lifecycle, it’d feature work from hundreds of Halo community members and release over 7000 images to fans.
Multiple giveaways, including the one above, were released when the page hit 10,000 likes
Unfortunately, at the peak of The Worlds First Poncho Chief’s visibility, the team was hit with a roadblock. In 2015, a large change happened with Facebook which unfortunately made Facebook Pages and Facebook Groups not viable for use, both as fans and creators.
This marked the change of platform from Facebook to Twitter. This also meant that operations on Facebook for the team would start to wind down, as we started to explore other alternatives for hosting Halo content.
The Website Era
Moving on from Facebook was a tough challenge for the team. Mainly for the fact that, unlike creators, fans still used Facebook every day. This meant we had to provide content for the Halo fans of Facebook, whilst not directly using it ourselves. That’s when, in 2015, we were presented with an opportunity to do just that.
During our work at Halo 4’s midnight launch, Halo MCC’s midnight launch and Halo 5’s midnight launch, an Xbox community website named XBLG (Xbox Live Gamerhub) noticed our efforts. They extended an opportunity to our team to work with them to produce a XBLG Halo Community section of the website, something we happily agreed to.
The Halo Community section of XBLG allowed us to continue our passionate work for the Halo community and feature community creators and creations to a wider audience. The site now known as Gamerhub unfortunately no longer has the old Halo Community section, but archives of these older posts are still accessible via the wayback machine.
The Halo Spotlight team would continue to work with a handful of Facebook pages, including its work on The Worlds First Poncho Chief, to share the XBLG Halo Community content from 2015-2019. At the same time, we aimed to move our content over to X (formally Twitter). During the course of this move, we’d also create Featured Artist articles, Community Highlight articles, Giveaway posts and our own original content.
Despite the platforms changing, along with the name we used to post our content, the goal was always the same. Be it as the XBLG Halo Community Section, The Worlds First Poncho Chief, or one of the other many names we’ve had as a team over the years, we’ve always aimed to put the Halo community front and centre.
Closing off the 2010s, the team chose to move away completely from Facebook and any non-Halo focused based websites. We had discussed for many years moving our content into its own website, which would allow us to have one unified place to host our content. This idea is something that would come to fruition sooner than we imagined.
The Current Era
The summer of 2019 saw a monumental event for Halo, Halo Outpost Discovery. A chance for Halo fans from around the world to attend one of the many events being hosted by the Halo developers. This was the perfect opportunity for our team to meet the fans, meet the developers and find people dedicated to helping the Halo Community.
Our team was lucky enough to meet a group of passionate Halo fans on our very first day in attendance at Orlando, sharing our history working with fans for many years. From that conversation came the discussion of creating a Halo Index, Halo Forum and dedicated Halo Website focused on the Halo community. Its name? Halo Respawn.
If that name sounds familiar, it’s because it’s still going strong today! Recently respawned and back into action, Halo Respawn is working hard to provide a space for fans to discuss all areas of Halo. That however is their story to tell.
Moving back to our part in it all. We helped create Halo Respawn as one of the founding members, with our role to provide the written content on the site. This included a similar formular to our previous pieces, featuring artists, projects, cosplayers, forgers and more. From 2019 to 2021, this is where we would put our focus.
During the end of 2020, the team at Halo Spotlight moved to helping Halo Respawn on a semi-regular basis. We loved the team and loved help craft an amazing community full of community focused articles, but also wanted to create something our team could put focus on and have a bigger hand in.
Leading up to the official launch of Halo Spotlight, we worked with two talented artists who helped create our initial welcome page and our branding. You can find credit to those on our partners page. They’ve gone on to do great things!
Early 2021 came around and so did the launch of HaloSpotlight.com. The story from then until now has been consistent. We still aim to provide Halo creators of all sizes a place to share their creations. Be it someone with 1 follower or 10000, we want to help spread the Halo passion and love to all fans.
There have been struggles over the years, mainly due to staff health and unforeseen circumstances, it happens. Even during our periods of absence, you have all supported us, so we want to thank YOU, the reader, for sticking by us all this time and allowing us to keep bringing joy to the Halo community.
We have a renewed partnership on the way, along with some very special team ups with fellow Halo communities and content creators. The goal? To allow as many Halo creators to get spotlight as possible, so please look forward to the future of Halo Spotlight.
That concludes the history of our team. We have had the absolute pleasure of working with the Halo community for nearly 2 decades and will do so for many more. Thank you all! We couldn’t have done any of it without you. Love from the Halo Spotlight Team!