You Play the mysterious John, known as Spartan-117 and The Master Chief, a Master Cheif Petty Officer in the United Nations Space Corp of the 26th Century. You are the last of a genetically enhanced group of super-soldiers of the Spartan II project. As the last of these super soldiers you alone wear The Mjolnir enhanced suit that increases your physical prowess through motor assistance. You are hastily removed from a Cryogenic freezer one day to find that the ship you have been traveling through space on, the Pillar of Autumn, is under attack from the Covenant (A conglomerate of several species of extra-terrestrials who have declared war on the Human race after their first inter-galactic settlement was formed) and you have been summoned by the Captain. Upon reaching the office you accept a pistol and an AI program, and are tasked with the protection of the AI because it knows the location of Earth. After battling through the ship and leaving in an escape pod you land on a mysterious ring world. After many days on the ring world you find that the planet is infested with another species of alien and must set upon a mammoth task to destroy the planet to protect the galaxy.
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In the very first level of Halo 2, Lieutenant Gonzalez asks Sergeant Johnson how on earth he managed to survive Halo. Johnson brushes it off, saying it's classified, and it's a direct little wink back to the legendary ending of the original game, where Johnson is last seen sharing an unlikely hug with an Elite as the ring blows up around them.
In the original Halo's ending cutscene, there's a moment where an Elite can be seen grabbing Sergeant Johnson's backside during their farewell hug. It seems 343 Industries noticed the same odd detail, because when Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary rolled around, they made sure Johnson returned the favour in kind.
There's a moment aboard the Pillar of Autumn near the end of the campaign where, if you play your cards right during the cutscene, you can spot Master Chief already tucked away in his cryo pod. It's a tiny blink-and-you-miss-it nod that ties Reach's ending directly into the opening of the very first Halo.
Before it was ever an FPS, Halo was pitched as a real-time strategy title for the Mac, and it was actually shown off on stage by Steve Jobs at Macworld Expo back in 1999. Microsoft bought Bungie not long after and the whole project got rebuilt from the ground up as an Xbox launch title.
Halo didn't start as a shooter at all. It moved from real-time strategy to third-person, and it was only once Bungie couldn't get precise aiming working in third-person view that they switched the whole game to first-person, which ended up defining the series forever.
Master Chief wasn't always the hulking Spartan super-soldier fans know now. In early builds he was just a regular cyborg exploring the ring, and it took a good chunk of development before he got scaled up into the icon on the box art.
Ever wondered why the game isn't just called Halo? Microsoft got nervous that a single-word title referencing a religious symbol might raise eyebrows, so Combat Evolved got bolted on at the last minute to make it read a bit less like scripture and a bit more like an action game.
The entire single-player campaign was built in roughly five months because of a hard deadline from Microsoft, and it shows if you pay attention — several of the later levels literally reuse earlier layouts run in reverse, because there simply wasn't time to build new spaces for the back half of the game.
As late as mid-2001, only months before launch, the vast majority of the game's script hadn't even been finished, which says a lot about how chaotic and last-minute the final stretch of Halo's development really was.
Before Halo turned Bungie into a household name, they were a respected but fairly niche studio best known for the Marathon and Myth series. Halo was the game that catapulted them from cult favourite to mainstream giant almost overnight.
