- last post: 01.01.0001 12:00 AM PDT
Posted by: JesseZinVT
Posted by: FlapJack
What the frick is all this crap about gates and skulls and skull orders and hidden messages crap? Could someone explain, PLEASE?!
Sprinkled throughout Halo 2 are skulls that you can pick up. When you pick one up, it makes a specific change to the gameplay. If you pick up the blind skull in Outskirts, your HUD dissappears. If you pick up the sputnik skull, you jump higher. There was some rumor posted a while ago that if you unlocked the skulls in a certain order, it would do something. There was also a rumor that unlocking them in the correct order would spell something out using the first letter of each skull's name. Some sort of hidden message.
Later, somebody noticed that at a certain part on the level Delta Halo, there is a switch (more specifically, the one from the MP map zanzibar) floating where one of the gondolas stops to let you on. A lot of people thought that this was linked to the skulls in some way. (videos have been made where they investigate it, just search for "Mystery of the Gate" at youtube, they'll explain it a lot better than I could.) After more investigation and such, it was found that there was a similar switch somewhere in one of the high charity levels. People went nuts over this for a while longer. People theorized that these switches opened some sort of gate somewhere, because if you opened them, you could hear a gate unlocking. (furthermore, there are strange triangles--one under the big lake on Delta Halo, another on the side of Cairo Station-that strangely resembled gates) People investigated this for a while, and concluded that the switch on delta halo was just a development placeholder for the gravity gondola.
The leading theory is that Bungie originally wanted to put something like a gate into the game to encourage people to investigate and solve it, but ran out of room on the disc for it, and the switch on high charity and the triangle gates are just leftovers from this attempt.
Frankly, I wouldn't put it past bungie to work something this big into the game just to reward those determined enough to put the time into finding it, but it's been pretty much proven that whatever Bungie wanted to put in, didn't get put in for whatever reason. Bungie never officially commented on it, so it's still something of a mystery.
From the sound of it, Halo 2 got kind of bungled in the beginning of its development, and Bungie was in a mad rush to make up the lost time. The gate project probably got lost in this development rush, and wasn't given the time to be fleshed out more, so it got cut. That's just my asessment of the status of the mystery of the gates, from what I've gathered about Halo 2's development.
Dang...how you explained this creeped me out. It was like watching a minute of the creepiest parts of the X-Files. xD
Thanks.