Witness the Master Chief’s return to finish the fight between the Covenant, the Flood, and the entire Human race in this dramatic, pulse-pounding conclusion of the original Halo trilogy. With the fate of the galaxy hanging in the balance, the Master Chief returns to uncover an ancient secret hidden beneath the sands of Africa, which could hold the key to humanity’s salvation or destruction – an object that could change the tide of the Human-Covenant conflict.
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Several Warthog variants, including an arctic camo version, a proper transport model, and a small ATV, were all built for Halo 2 and then dropped before launch. They didn't go to waste forever though. The ATV effectively resurfaced as the Mongoose in Halo 3, and the arctic Warthog eventually made it into a Halo 3 map pack years later.
Every mainline Halo game since has included collectible Skulls scattered through its campaign levels, letting players toggle in modifiers that make runs harder or just plain stranger. That whole tradition, including fan favourites like the dialogue-altering IWHBYD Skull and the notoriously brutal Iron Skull, actually started right here in Halo 2.
Pick up the bomb in Assault and there's a chance it'll have something scrawled on the casing. It rotates through a handful of lines, including 'Thus I Refute Thee' and 'Kiss It Goodbye,' a running gag that Bungie carried across three games rather than just the one.
Club Errera in New Alexandria isn't a brand new layout, it's actually built on top of the Tayari Plaza map from Halo 3, just redressed and repurposed. Reusing the geometry saved the team time while still giving the level a totally different mood.
On the campaign level The Covenant, after clearing out the Scarabs, flying a Hornet or Banshee out to the right-hand ledge of the Citadel and waiting a couple of minutes triggers a strange audio cue: the old Windows text-to-speech voice, Microsoft Sam, cutting in to poke fun at composer Marty O'Donnell and the rest of the development team. One of the lines even riffs on a piece of Gravemind's dialogue from Halo 2.
Bungie's running hippo joke, first hidden on shotgun shell casings in the original Halo, made its way into Halo 3 too. Tucked in a pile of garbage in the back right corner of the multiplayer map Foundry sits a tiny hippo image, only really visible if you zoom in with a sniper rifle scope.
Inside a freezer on the downloadable map Longshore is a scrawled sign that's only legible at a specific viewing angle. What makes it stand out is that Bungie actually rigged it to change depending on the real-world date, swapping in different jokes and images for holidays like New Year's Day, Halloween, and Bungie's own July 7th 'Bungie Day.'
On the opposite ledge from the Microsoft Sam gag, at the top of the Citadel structure at the end of The Covenant, players can trigger a hidden music track known as Siege of Madrigal, an unused piece of score that most people playing through the campaign normally would never hear.
Halo 3 let players brand themselves with a short callsign called a service tag, but Bungie blocked a surprising number of combinations. Anything that spelled out a rival console, a real Halo character's name, or an offensive word was rejected outright, and any tag ending in double zero was banned entirely.
Bungie once published data on the most popular service tags players had chosen for themselves, and pop culture references dominated the list, with a nod to James Bond's '007' topping the chart, followed closely by tags referencing the M16 rifle and other numeric in-jokes.
