Posted by:ScubaToaster
Posted by: HipiO7
This man, this man right here put it so eloquently that I actually cancelled my own 2000+ word long post.
/slow clap for respect
:)
The person who said participating is important, not winning, obviously never won anything.
Once the dominant civilization in the Milky Way, the Forerunners reached the pinnacle of technological advancement approximately 100,300 years before the Human-Covenant War. Apparently charged by the mysterious Precursors with protecting less advanced civilizations in the galaxy, they stumbled upon the Flood and fought a three-hundred-year long war to stop the genocidal parasitic species from overrunning the galaxy. When it looked as if they were going to fail at that task, they built and activated the Halo Array - sterilizing the entire galaxy of sentient life including themselves, starving the Flood into submission, and repopulating the galaxy again with those few species saved from extinction.[1]
All that remains now of the Forerunners are the ruins of their ancient temples and cities, a few scattered pieces of functional technology, and their automated combat and maintenance constructs. Their technological brilliance, combined with a garbled version of the Halo activation, led to the Covenant's religion revering the Forerunners as deities, and that this state could be achieved again by activating the Halo's. In turn, these attempts led to the Human-Covenant War, and the eventual secession of the Sangheili and their alliance with humanity to stop the Covenant.
This is good for now as a basic understanding.