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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The PC and Mac ports snuck in a bit of bonus content for multiplayer that console players never got, including a flamethrower that had been cut from the main game at the last minute, plus the ability to use Banshees and a rocket-launcher-armed Warthog in matches.
Composer Marty O'Donnell didn't just score the game — his own voice was recorded and processed to create the guttural sound effects used for Hunters, Jackals and the Flood, so in a strange way the monsters of Halo all share one vocal cord.
Joseph Staten, who directed the game's cutscenes, also lent his voice to every single Grunt in Combat Evolved, a role he kept returning to across the series and only skipped once, for Halo 4.
Bungie genuinely didn't expect anyone outside of college dorms with existing network setups to bother with System Link multiplayer, which is why the feature only supports linking four Xbox consoles together. Nobody predicted people would happily lug their TVs to a friend's house for it.
There's an enormous amount of unscripted-sounding chatter buried in the game — north of 8,000 individual lines of dialogue that fire off randomly during firefights, which is a big part of why the marines and grunts feel so alive in combat.
Look closely at the original box art and you'll spot a mistake — the Banshees are drawn hovering with nobody in the cockpit and firing narrow laser beams, when in the actual game they always need a pilot and fire chunky plasma orbs instead.
The flashy E3 demo that first showed off Halo to the world was smoke and mirrors in one big way — none of the enemies or allies on screen were actually running on AI, every bit of their movement was pre-scripted for the presentation.
Buried in the game's code is a scrapped enemy called the Engineer, a small, pink, blob-like creature that just floats around aimlessly. It was never meant to be seen by players and can only be summoned using a mod chip, but it matches a creature glimpsed in some of Halo's earliest pre-release footage.
If you played through the old PC demo to the very end, you'd get a 49-second faux-infomercial narrated in character by Sergeant Johnson, cheerfully hard-selling you on buying the full retail release, tongue firmly in cheek.
Combat Evolved didn't just define a console generation, it earned a lasting spot in the book 1001 Video Games You Must Play Before You Die, sitting alongside decades of gaming history as one of the titles considered genuinely essential.
