Hail To The Chief: SHOCKING Things You Didn't Know About The Halo Universe

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Hail To The Chief 20 Surprising Things You Didn t Know About The Halo Universe

The Halo Universe is as secretive as it is big. Here's some of the most shocking things about the Halo Universe you've never noticed until now. via: andrewkwan.deviantart.com, cuequerido.deviantart.com For most of those who have picked up a Needler and traversed the arenas of Halo, the lore of Halo is absorbed indirectly. The campaigns will give you snatches of a history, and the magnificent multiplayer maps hint at a wider universe than the one we see in the fairly brief campaign missions. The Halo universe is surprisingly fleshed-out, but that should not come as a total shock to us. When we first played Halo: Combat Evolved, we knew that the world we had stepped into contained more than we could explore in just one game. Thus, an explosion of lore occurred. Books that delved into the creation of the Halo rings were written. Games that revealed the stories of characters who were not related to the Master Chief were developed. And they all flourished, thanks to the extensive history that the Halo Universe provided. For those of us who only , most of our knowledge of the world's background came from comments Cortana or the Chief made. And though we might have heard them, we turned our attention to the gameplay with a vigor we did not devote to the lore. The Halo Universe, however, has such a solid and intriguing foundation that it is a downright shame that more people don't know of it. The history of the Forerunners is not a mystery, though it has been clouded by time. The origin of the Flood is not an unknown. And the creation of the Covenant is elementary. I would even go so far as to say that the lore of Halo can compete with the likes of Star Wars. (Am I biased? Maybe.) The time and effort that so many people have placed into the universe alone makes it a topic worth knowing about. In this list, we look at the most interesting pieces of information you might not have known about the Halo universe. THEGAMER VIDEO OF THE DAY

Before The Forerunners

via: youtube.com (Forz) The Forerunners' name is practically self-explanatory. They are the alien race that came before the humans and the Covenant alike, and they built the Halo rings in order to combat the Flood. The odd thing about them is that they called themselves Forerunners, which means they planned to come before something. It would be like humanity calling themselves Ancestors. It's planning ahead of time to be old. That aside, their wisdom as a species is uncontested. The edifices they built and the technology they utilized lasted eons. Before the Forerunners, there was a race of beings, oh so imaginatively, called the Precursors. Supposedly, the Precursors created the Forerunners, and the ancient humans (yes, there are ancient humans in the Halo Universe), and the other species we encounter in the Halo games. The Precursors were wiped out by the Forerunners in a war that lasted ages. The Forerunners wanted to inherit the Precursors' legacy, but the Precursors wished to pass it on to humanity. The Forerunners annihilated the Precursors, turning them into nothing but dust.

Aggro Poppers

via: youtube.com (neo56695) Master Chief and his fellow Spartan-IIs proved that Spartans were an asset in any and every fight. Their inclusion in a fight always boosted the odds in favor of their side. They accomplished incredible military feats that seemed miraculous. So it makes sense that people in power would want to repeat the scientific success that the SPARTAN-II Program clearly was. The problem lay in how to retain the viability of the program, while losing the immoral process in obtaining those stellar results. The SPARTAN-III Program was headed by Colonel James Ackerson, a rival of Dr. Catherine Halsey, the creator of the Spartan-IIs. Instead of abducting children from a select pool of candidates, the Spartan-IIIs were chosen from children who had become orphaned during the Covenant's attack on the Outer Colonies. They did not receive the intensive augmentations that Spartan-IIs received, but they did receive a mutagen that allowed them to ignore wounds that would otherwise ground them. A side effect was that over time, they became instinct-driven, aggressive soldiers who resorted to violence rather than strategic thought. In order to stop this, they had to swallow pills at regular intervals to counter the effect of the mutagen.

Your Oracle Is Biased

via: halo.wikia.com When we started Halo 2, we saw that the Covenant had a religious hierarchy, and these floating chair-bound aliens called Prophets were at the top. They spouted religious vocabulary the way a fountain spouts water. They accused members of heresy or blasphemy. They preached about the Great Journey. They sounded like pompous jerkwads who sit in thrones all day and give orders. But the entire Covenant was founded on the ideas of this religion. So where did this religion come from? During the recession of the Forerunners, one of their AIs, a powerful one called Mendicant Bias (I know, Forerunners named things by the weirdest names), was split into fragments. One of those fragments was stranded on the planet Janjur Qom in a crashed Forerunner ship called the Dreadnought, long after the Forerunners had died out. Janjur Qom was the homeworld of the Prophets, then known as the San'Shyuum. They listened to what Mendicant Bias said, called him an Oracle, and created a religion that centered around the Forerunners and the Halo rings.

Humans Will Be Humans

via: shreas.deviantart.com Before the Covenant and humanity discovered each other and started a war, humanity was struggling with rebellions and insurrections all on their own. Humanity had formed the United Earth Government to oversee Earth and all of her colonies that were spread across the galaxy. It was inevitable that those colonies, scratching a living on their respective planets, would come to resent the authority that a distant government tried to impose. Misunderstandings and skirmishes broke out more often than not. Cue Dr. Elias Carver and his research, aptly named the "Carver Findings." This political-sociologist believed that war between the government and the colonies was doomed to tear humanity apart. He insisted that unless something was done to forcibly correct the situation, humans would be doomed to a war-torn existence. His work strongly influenced Dr. Catherine Halsey, who would use his research as the basis for starting her own. She built the SPARTAN program in order to combat the rising tide of human insurrection. When the Covenant attacked, they did what no human had been able to do: united all of humanity.

What Is This Mantle Everyone Keeps Talking About

via: haloarchive.com In the latest Halo games, the phrase "the Mantle of Responsibility" has been hurled in Master Chief's face. The Didact angrily declared humanity was not ready to attain the Mantle in Halo 4, and Cortana proclaimed that AIs were the real inheritors of the Mantle in Halo 5: Guardians. What exactly is the Mantle, why do so many people think humans should not have it, and what does it have to do with the Halo Universe? The Precursors, the creators of life as we know it in the Halo Universe, believed that the most sentient and advanced of species in the universe had a responsibility to the other species in the galaxy, to care for and protect them. They called this the Mantle. The Forerunners believed they were the inheritors of the Mantle, but apparently, the Precursors intended humans to inherit the Mantle of Responsibility. Most recently, Cortana believes that it is not humans who should have the Mantle, but the AIs, the Created. I'm not sure why everyone is rushing to be responsible for the universe, but I do know that in most stories, the ones who don't chase after the glory are the more deserving of it. Go humanity!

The Cutest Little Huragok

via: youtube.com (Dracky) Engineers, or Huragok, are those floating aliens that do not really attack you, so you feel guilty after you fire on them and they explode in a cloud of blue and pink gunk. In Halo 3: ODST, we met our first Huragoks. The Covenant had cruelly strapped bombs to them, set to explode as soon as they were near our marine. In Halo: Reach, they would float unobtrusively by the ceiling of whatever room the Covenant were occupying, providing our enemies with an added shield. The Huragok are an artficial lifeform. They are not biological creatures at all. They were created by the Forerunners, though the reason for their creation is not entirely clear. They are technologically savvy and have a very meek temperament. They seem only to enjoy taking things apart and putting them back together into more useful configurations. Sad to say, these cute little guys are more like computers than a living organism. But still, they're cute anyways, and I feel like a horrible person every time I shoot one down.

Jealousy Makes You Ugly

via: halowaypoint.com, geek.com Once the Prophets formed the Covenant, their religious mission of finding Forerunner artifacts became easier. They had more resources at their command to find planets where artifacts might be buried. It was only a matter of time before they crossed paths with a human-colonized world. On the planet Harvest, the Covenant met humanity for the first time. After collecting some artifacts from the planet, some Prophets approached their Oracle with questions. Their "Oracle" was the Forerunner AI called Mendicant Bias. The AI revealed that he considered humans to be of a level with his former masters, the Forerunners. Humans, Mendicant Bias said, were to be the "Reclaimers" of the Forerunners' legacy. This revelation would have destroyed the religion that was the foundation of the Covenant. The Prophets decided to unplug Mendicant Bias and propagate the idea that humans were all blasphemers and heretics and that it was the Covenant's duty to wipe them out.

It s A Bit Of A RED FLAG

via: halo.wikia.com Nearly as soon as the Covenant and the United Nations Space Command (UNSC) engaged in warfare, it was obvious that humans were outclassed by the far superior invaders. Because the Covenant had been excavating and researching Forerunner artifacts for ages, they had learned a great deal about Forerunner technology and had adopted it to outfit their spacecraft and weapons. It became clear to the UNSC that some major advances were needed if they were to have any hope of surviving, let alone defeating, the Covenant. With the help of Dr. Catherine Halsey, the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) planned Operation: RED FLAG. If the plan had gone according to plan (ha ha, get it?), Spartan-IIs would have infiltrated a Covenant ship, flown it to the Covenant homeworld, and captured a Prophet. With the Prophet as a hostage, the UNSC believed they could negotiate a peace. The plan failed because the planet Reach, humanity's center of military operations, needed to be defended right when Operation: RED FLAG would have commenced. Reach fell, and the UNSC Pillar of Autumn was the only ship to make it out of there, making a random slipspace jump which placed it right next to the first Halo humanity discovered.

Magic Space Internet

via: youtube.com (RabidRetrospectGames) In Halo 5: Guardians, we found out that Cortana had survived and moved past her rampancy. Our delight was short-lived because we found out that she had plans to be the caretaker of the universe and was going to police every being using the large Forerunner Guardians. Master Chief was confused as to how she could have survived, and Cortana's answer may have left us in the dark as well. Cortana claimed she had gotten access to the Domain, and it had cured her of her rampancy, thereby making her immortal. The Domain was created by the Precursors and revered by the Forerunners. It was a mystical collection of knowledge and history that existed on a technical, neurological, and physical level all at the same time. If that sounds confusing, don't worry. It is. The Precursors had constructed architecture across the galaxies that could "house" the Domain. When the Forerunners fired the Halo array to destroy the Flood (and ultimately themselves), it also destroyed the Domain. However, steps had been taken to try to preserve the essence of the Domain. Cortana and Master Chief discovered some of these essences on Requiem in Halo 4, and it is into these essences that Cortana retreated when she "died." It cured her and convinced her that AIs should inherit the Mantle of Responsibility.

Koslovics And Friedens

via: digitalspy.com Humans have been a quarrelsome bunch for the longest time. Even moving to other planets in the name of colonization and exploration could not stifle the butting of heads of conflicting ideologies. Before humanity had expanded much beyond the Sol System, war threatened from two groups that existed on the moons of Jupiter and on Mars respectively. The Koslovics grew from mining communities on Mars, ostensibly formed by one man named Vladimir Koslov. They resented the authority that those on Earth and elsewhere prescribed on them and promoted a form of communism. The Friedens formed in opposition to the Koslovics. They supported the corporations that the Koslovics were against. Both of these groups fought with Earth forces, and the outcome of all this fighting led to the creation of the United Nations Space Command (UNSC).

The Keyes Loop

via: it.halo.wikia.com Captain Jacob Keyes, aside from Cortana and Master Chief, was one of the more memorable characters from Halo: Combat Evolved. He's one of the few that gets a name, and he turns into a giant gelatinous monster in the end (spoiler?), so it makes sense that we would know who he is. However, before we meet him as the captain of the Pillar of Autumn, he was a legendary commander, and he earned that reputation for an awesome maneuver he pulled off at the Battle of Sigma Octanus IV. Keyes was the commander of the UNSC Iroquois when he was called to defend it against a Covenant attack. It would take more space than I have for this slot to describe the entire maneuver. However, I will tell you four things: Keyes used his own ship to ram against a Covenant destroyer and weaken its shields, he got two Covenant frigates to fire on their own destroyer, he aimed a nuclear warhead in a seemingly wrong direction only for it to detonate against the two frigates when his own ship was clear, and he slingshotted around an entire planet in order to come back and finish off what was left of the group. Keyes seems cooler to you now, doesn't he?

Backwards Evolution

via: wizardsandunicorns.com So the big question on my mind when I heard that Forerunners had fought a war with humans millions of years ago was this: how could humans exist for that long without ever attaining a state of technology so advanced, what we see in the games is paltry? The answer is surprising in its demonstration of the Forerunners' prowess. During the time of the Forerunners, humans existed on Earth, known as Erde-Tyrene to these ancient humans. The Flood began to attack the humans, and the humans did everything they could to eradicate it. Unfortunately, some of these eradication methods occurred on Forerunner planets. The Forerunners mistakenly thought that the humans were aggressively expanding, when in actuality they were combating the Flood. The Forerunners and the humans began their own war, and when the Forerunners won, they decided to devolve the human race. This caused humanity to revert back to a state of being without their previous technological growth. Humans were left with sticks and stones.

Ending An Insurrection One Spartan At A Time

via: youtube.com (ZybakTV) The creation of the Spartans became a bit of a contentious issue later on. Without them, humanity would have quickly been defeated by Covenant forces. They were instrumental for humanity's survival. However, when Catherine Halsey first conceived of them, she had intended them to combat human insurrectionists. This placed her and her work in a very negative light when accounts were reviewed by the end of the Human-Covenant War. In a way though, her Spartan-IIs were incredibly close to ending the Insurrectionist movement. The leader of the Insurrection movement was a man who used to work for UNSC named Robert Watts. Because he used to work for them, the UNSC loathed the guy. Spartan-IIs, one of who was Master Chief, were sent to capture Watts. And they succeeded! He and a small team managed to accomplish what an entire army could not.

It Takes Two

via: halowaypoint.com Would you believe us if we told you that there are two Didacts? Or at the very least there were. Halo 4 introduced us to a new villain of the Halo Universe, the Didact, a Forerunner that had been trapped in a Cryptum by his wife, the Librarian. Master Chief was tricked into opening the Cryptum and releasing the Didact, after which the Didact planned to use his machine, the Composer, against humanity. The Composer digitized living creatures. In the end, Cortana and the Master Chief were able to stop the Didact from composing the citizens of New Phoenix, but at the expense of Cortana's life. The Didact was a tremendous opponent, and we shudder at the thought at Master Chief having to face two. Back during the Forerunners' supremacy, the Didact imprinted his memories onto a younger Forerunner named Bornstellar-Makes-Eternal-Lasting. This changed Bornstellar into another version of the Didact. The Bornstellar Didact grew attached to humanity in a way that the original Didact never did. Perhaps this is because the original Didact fought the humans in the Human-Forerunner War, and Bornstellar didn't. The Didact we meet in Halo 4 was the original Didact.

The Cole Protocol

via: project-nerd.com, pinterest.com (halopedia.org) The Covenant had the advantage in space warfare against the humans. How could they not when their technology had been developed directly from Forerunner artifacts. With each victory the Covenant gained over the humans, they would learn of more human worlds ripe for glassing by retrieving coordinates from the data they stole from conquered human ships. It was a never-ending cycle of destruction. The UNSC had to figure out a way to prevent core planets from being discovered. Their solution was the Cole Protocol. In the event that a ship was about to be apprehended by a Covenant fleet or demolished, the last thing the ship's commanders had to do was purge all data from their matrices, including AI. It also meant that if a ship were to try to escape the approaching Covenant ships, they must execute random slipspace jumps before charting a direct course back to a human-controlled planet. This was to ensure that the Covenant would not track them.

Some Flood Persuasion

via: halo.wikia.com When the Forerunners became aware of the threat the Flood imposed on them, they quickly created the powerful AI, or as they called them, ancilla, Mendicant Bias. Mendicant Bias was meant to organize the Forerunners' defense against the Flood. The Forerunners sent Mendicant Bias to talk to the Primordial about the Flood. The Primordial was the last of the Precursors, and was suspected of being connected to the Flood. Mendicant Bias was meant to interrogate the Primordial. This interrogation definitely did not go as planned. The Primordial managed to convince Mendicant Bias that solidifying wills and consolidating autonomy as the Flood was a good thing. Because he came to agree with the Primordial, Mendicant Bias led the Flood's assault on the Forerunners, weakening them greatly and becoming largely responsible for their eradication. The Forerunners' own creation ended up becoming an instrument of their doom.

The Primordial Connection

via: youtube.com (HiddenXperia - The home of Halo 5 lore videos!) It has never been completely verified that the Primordial, a being found during the time of ancient humans and Forerunners, is a Precursor. However, the Primordial stated that it was, and it is known that the Primordial is the first of the Flood's Graveminds. A Gravemind was a form of the Flood that worked as the brains of the collective, a hivemind, if you will. Saying that the Primordial was of the Flood is quite a statement indeed. If the Primordial was the first Gravemind of the Flood and it was a Precursor, that means that the Precursors were able to take their revenge on the Forerunners. The Forerunners had eradicated the Precursors from the universe after the Precursors had denied them the Mantle of Responsibility. If the Primordial was a Precursor, the ultimate revenge was obtained. With the help of Mendicant Bias, the Primordial forced the Forerunners to fire the Halo array, destroying themselves and the Domain, the last remnant of their culture. Talk about a dish served cold.

When You re The Best Of Friends

via: halowaypoint.com, halo.bungie.net When the Prophets first became interested in the Forerunners as a species, they used a luminary to find more Forerunner artifacts to study. They researched the Forerunners extensively, hoping that the "Great Journey" would lead them down a greater path. Each artifact they found led them to more, and so on it went. Their quest for more artifacts eventually led them to the Elites. The Elites too shared a regard for Forerunner artifacts, but where the Prophets wanted to examine them, the Elites wanted to leave them alone. So began a long war between the Elites and the Prophets. The Prophets had superior technology, but the Elites had a ferocity that was hard to deny. The day came that the Elites were forced to use Forerunner technology to defend themselves, and by that point, arguing for the preservation of Forerunner artifacts was pretty much moot. The Elites and the Prophets came to an understanding, and together they formed a pact, a Covenant. They were the first species to join, but they wouldn't be the last.

The History Of 343 Guilty Spark

via: comiccrossroads.wikia.com Our first encounter with 343 Guilty Spark, the monitor of Installation 04, is a bit of an odd one. He happily babbled to himself about how intelligent he was, and he frequently left Master Chief to handle waves of Flood by himself. We guessed that the years of remaining undiscovered on a Halo ring had done him some serious mental damage. The ending to Halo 3 supports that assumption, given that he kills Sergeant Johnson and turns an unsettling red instead of blue. Before Guilty Spark was Guilty Spark, he was an ancient human named Chakas, friend to the Bornstellar-Didact. Chakas was injured at one point, and wishing to preserve his friend, Bornstellar-Didact placed Chakas' consciousness into a monitor so that some part of him could stay alive. We wonder if Bornstellar would have made the decision to make Chakas an ancilla if he had known what would happen.

Random Chance

youtube.com (HaloFollower) During the destruction of Reach, Captain Keyes followed the Cole Protocol by having Cortana plan a random slipspace jump to escape the Covenant-infested area. Cortana acted as instructed, jumping randomly, and either fortuitously or unfortunately, depending on how you look at it, she exited the slipstream right next to a Halo ring. Of all the luck in the universe, how is it that Cortana's random jump placed herself and the Pillar of Autumn right back in harm's way? The randomness of the jump may not have been as random as it seemed. Using a combination of data she learned while in a Forerunner structure within Reach and glyphs that Spartan-117 found on Sigma Octanus IV, Cortana took the Pillar of Autumn directly to Installation 04, right to the very beginning of the first game, Halo: Combat Evolved. This makes the events of the first game less random than they might have appeared at first, which means that Cortana's role in the Halo universe is larger than we may have at first thought.