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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One of the developers snuck a personal touch into the very first level. Turn on your own marines on the bridge and a squad of elites gets sent in to deal with you. Survive them, push into the room they came from, and you'll find the letter M shot into the wall in bullet holes, a quiet nod to someone's girlfriend.
During the frantic final Warthog dash off the exploding Pillar of Autumn, if you're brave enough to ignore the countdown and take a detour instead, there's a hidden side room with the word REX scrawled across the walls in blood, one of the more unsettling little secrets in the game.
The bulletin board you pass early on the Pillar of Autumn is worth a proper read. Tucked among the notices is a callback to Bungie's old office address and a cheeky nod to Alien, complete with a missing cat poster for one Jonesy, the same name as the ship's cat in Ridley Scott's film.
In the level where you're hunting for Captain Keyes in the swamp, there's a spot where staying completely still and mashing the grenade button the moment Foe Hammer mentions the last transmission will let the dropship take off again with you still aboard, giving you a short bonus flight before it eventually crashes.
The rings were never a weapon aimed at the Covenant or humanity specifically. They were the Forerunners' final, horrifying failsafe against the Flood, designed to starve the parasite out by erasing every sentient species in range that could act as a host, a scale of sacrifice the game only hints at until deep in the campaign.
That chattering floating light that helps you through the second half of the campaign isn't some throwaway NPC. He's a Forerunner Monitor who has been alone, tending to Installation 04, for something like a hundred thousand years, which goes a long way toward explaining his slightly unhinged cheerfulness.
The game's final post-credits shot isn't just a throwaway sting. It shows Guilty Spark surviving the ring's destruction and making his own way through space to the nearest Forerunner outpost, a gas mining facility that would go on to become a full location in 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.
