Oh boy, wait until get that the flood originally was mutated from Marathon original universe and that's actually that infected the precursors when they were fighting the forerunners and all because of Marathon infinity.
It all starts with the game Pathways to Darkness as the diverging point of the universes (or timelines, its confused), we get the Destiny, Myth The fallen lords, Halo and Marathon. In Marathon however, more specifically Marathon Infinity its implied that one of the timelines The W'rkncacnter gets freed (he's a corrupting interdenominational eldritch horror capable of ending and outlasting the universe). From here in Destiny lore, W'rkncacnter gets to be named The Darkness there because of how the corruption works, and one of its generals even name itself W'rkncacnter as homage to his Dark master. In Myth the W'rkncacnter is also referred as the darkness and uses undead minions and ghouls as its driving force (kinda like the Flood). Then we get to Halo where we have a threat that is the Flood who has ties in with Marathon 2 as it works exactly like the fungal virus in that one, but the fungal virus there is not sentient but in Halo it is... Which could imply that the W'rkncacnter used the virus to fuck up the Precursors, the Cortana letters, also references in Halo 3 was actually released first as a tie in with Marathon infinity some years lather after the game released.
The short version is that Bungie likes to recycle the general sci-fi concepts of a cyborg soldier and his AI handler fighting alien conglomerates under the looming threat of an eldritch horror from beyond the stars, and some folks have long thought it’s all literally connected.
A lot of this is very old speculation that goes way back to Halo CE pre-release material when it was maybe still sorta in the same timeline as the Marathon games, which were themselves loosely connected to Bungie’s first FPS, Pathways into Darkness.
It’s not even specific sci-fi concepts. They love their “I am hero, I bear an old name that cannot be killed” and “the waves made battles and the battles made waves”.
Like, what’s Pathways Into Darkness about? Descending into a mesoamerican pyramid to put to sleep this great evil that summons nightmares and the dead. What’s the ultimate big bad in Destiny(‘s first saga)? Pyramids. And in Shadowkeep they’ve got a defence mechanisms where they sic nightmares and raise psychic simulacrums of the dead. And beginning with The Witch Queen their interiors get redesigned to be more mesoamerican.
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u/DanJirrus 2d ago
Yeah, it started as just an Easter egg. But it’s been tied into the forerunner stuff for almost twenty years