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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 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.
Right from the opening level, Sierra 117, Bungie hid a string of small carvings in the jungle's tree trunks, from an initialed love note and a date to a tiny caveman figure and even a whole hidden caveman family. They're easy to run straight past, but they were part of a much longer campaign-wide easter egg hunt players pieced together over the years.
Deep in the campaign level The Ark, near the seventh data terminal, players can find a floating cardboard cutout of Bungie co-founder Jason Jones, dressed in nothing but a pair of gym shorts. It's one of several in-jokes the studio hid throughout the level for eagle-eyed fans who go looking off the beaten path.
