After the events on the Forerunner ringworld Halo, Master Chief SPARTAN-117 returns home to Earth with the AI construct Cortana. The war with the Covenant forces is still not going well, despite the destruction of an entire fleet at Halo, but the Master Chief needs a refit. Armed with the Mjolnir Armor Mark VI, he is on his way to a decorations ceremony with the thought-to-be-dead Sergeant Johnson, when Covenant forces emerge from the Slipstream into Earth space. But something is wrong: the fleet is much smaller than the one used to destroy Reach, humanity's former frontline stronghold. The Master Chief and Cortana, along with Commander Miranda Keyes and the crew of In Amber Clad, must fight off the Covenant and protect Earth, a battle that will take them across the galaxy to a new planet, which is disturbingly familiar...Meanwhile, the Prophets, leaders of the Covenant, are not pleased with the Elite Commander that allowed the Master Chief to destroy Halo, and he is branded a heretic. But even Heretics have their uses. He is to become the new Arbiter, a warrior for the Prophets' will, destined to die in glorious battle like all the other Arbiters before him. But deep in the Covenant, rumors are spreading about a Jiralhanae take-over. Can the Arbiter uncover this treachery in time to save the Elites?
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The name of the Flood's central intelligence wasn't lifted from any existing mythology, it was coined by Bungie staff writer Jaime Griesemer specifically for the character. The Gravemind is voiced throughout the trilogy by actor Dee Bradley Baker, known for his extensive voice work across animation and games.
The Gravemind almost always speaks in a distinct poetic meter, trochaic heptameter, and when Cortana challenges it on this habit, it explains that it carries the memories of countless poets from cultures far beyond human experience, giving it both the vocabulary and the quickness of mind to compose verse as it speaks rather than labour over words.
Behind the Spartan number and the legendary Armour, Master Chief has a first name that rarely comes up in dialogue: John. The Gravemind is one of the very few beings in the wider universe ever shown learning and using it, a small but telling detail about how much the Flood's intelligence comes to know about the humans it hunts.
The Gravemind's telepathic voice isn't only heard by the Chief. According to the wider lore, a Marine once overheard it speaking through nearby combat forms and was driven to insanity by what's known as the logic plague, implied to have taken his own life off-screen as a result. It's a small aside that hints at just how psychologically dangerous simply being near the Flood's collective mind can be.
Wander through Vinewood's 'Chinatown' district and you can find street performers dressed as identical copies of Halo's Master Chief, posing for tips just like the costumed performers found on real Hollywood Boulevard.
When Halo 2 dropped on 9th November 2004, it pulled in $125 million in a single day across the US and Canada alone, shifting roughly 2.38 million copies before the sun had even properly come up. At the time that beat the opening weekend of every blockbuster movie going, including Spider-Man 2, which is a wild thing for a game to do.
It wasn't just the game flying off shelves. Prima's official Halo 2 strategy guide sold over 270,000 copies on launch day, which publisher Random House said was its best first-day book sales since Bill Clinton's autobiography came out. A game guide outselling a former president's memoir on day one is a pretty good measure of how big this thing was.
GameStop, on its own, moved more than 500,000 copies of Halo 2 in the first 24 hours, which the chain said was more than any other game had ever managed on its opening day at their stores. Fans had been queuing outside some 7,000 retailers for up to 15 hours beforehand just to get their copy at midnight.
During the theatrical trailer campaign for Halo 2, the usual xbox.com web address quietly swapped to ilovebees.com for a split second. Anyone who typed it in found a site that looked like it had been hijacked by an AI, and over the following months it unspooled an entire alternate reality game explaining how the Covenant actually managed to track Earth down, something the first game never answered.
The title of Arbiter wasn't always an honour. It was originally handed to Sangheili warriors as a way to atone for failing the Covenant, and the missions that came with it were basically expected to end in death. Thel 'Vadam only gets the rank in Halo 2 because he let humans destroy the first Halo ring, and for most of the game he's stripped of his own name entirely, only ever addressed as 'the Arbiter' as a mark of disgrace.
