Hunting the last UNSOLVED Halo 3 ODST Easter Egg (Secret Glyph Project)

halo 3 odst was such a special game when it first released in 2009 and what's really unique about it is that it was a self-contained story made by a smaller team of developers at bungie and one thing that really made halo 3 odst stand out was that it had this gripping story centered on uncovering what happened within the narrative and while on the surface the story of this game was one that was absolutely captivating to fans there's always been something about halo 3 odst that has intrigued so many people within the halo community but what if all along some of the developers at bungie hid another narrative that existed right in front of us this whole time one that could be told through a series of clues symbols and easter eggs that even to this day over 11 years later remains one of the biggest unsolved mysteries in the entire halo franchise despite it actually being confirmed by a bungie employee in 2011. today we wanted to take a look at the unsolved mystery of new mbasa [Music] one thing that's really interesting about odst is how the game's core story emphasizes this search for what happened to you and your squad you play as the rookie and you're tasked with finding items that could link you back up with your allies and escape the city overrun with the covenant but with new mobasa giving players access to one of the largest open areas in a halo game for its time bungie put more than just a few objective items throughout the city which were shrouded in mystery whether the city had cool phones that could give you access to an interesting audio log story or secret rooms that you're able to access for vehicles and weapons new mombasa had a unique atmosphere that constantly brought players back to the game to truly leave no stone unturned and while players like luke and i have played through odst many times now we never really thought more about some of these finer oddities that we've overlooked throughout the years that were right there in front of us this whole time but that was only until we met tepik vet a longtime member of the halo community and admin of the number one french halo community halo creation over a decade ago when halo 3 odst first came out tepig was heavily involved in various halo community message boards where many players had noticed that there was something really unique going on in certain areas of new mombasa on the level mombasa streets and if you played through halo 3 odst you probably have actually noticed that in various areas of new mombasa if you activate your visor you can see these walls of glyphs scattered across the areas where you may find engineers also known as huragox these symbols not only aesthetically look really cool and a lot of people chalk them up to just be a really unique design choice to kind of highlight the visor mode that bungie introduced in odst but also resulted in a large portion of the community wondering if maybe there was something more here it wouldn't be the first time that bungie would be involved in some pretty serious and intricate easter eggs like some of the args bungie did back in the day for instance to promote halo 2 there was a huge interactive real-life treasure hunt that was all based around a website and a code decryption just to get hype for halo 2 which was called i love bees and bungie is known for continuously hiding things throughout their halo games so seeing something like these symbols on walls made a lot of players question whether or not there was something more to what was going on here and interestingly enough as it turns out some of the writers who worked on that arg for halo 2 ended up working on odst's side narrative or easter egg narrative sadie's story which are those audio logs and we'll actually come back to that a little bit later but just shortly after the release of halo 3 odst thread after thread in conversation after conversation throughout the halo community began to pop up and eventually some members in the community were so intrigued by these symbols that the quest to get to the bottom of what these glyphs actually could mean started up now there were so many efforts and collaborative investigations from various subsets of the halo community like the secret glyph project who tried to break down what these symbols could possibly mean there were people theorizing and drawing links to other oddities found in odst i mean there were odd signs with weird symbols throughout the city and people noticed other little oddities like weapons that made it into cut scenes that were not even in the game as usable weapons there were places that looked like they could be accessed but always seemed to be just out of reach and then on top of all of that they were references to the poet t.s eliot just like in halo 2 and 3 which made a lot of people speculate as to whether or not that would lead into something else but a lot of these leads never got anywhere and were never anything that could really be tied back to what these symbols on the wall could mean don't get me wrong there were a lot of great theories and ideas as to what some of these engineer glyphs could possibly mean and even joseph staton the lead writer for halo 3 odst said in an interview that there was a story behind these glyphs now a lot of members in the halo community pointed out that the glyphs were often found in areas with engineers and joseph staton even went on to confirm that they were in fact drawn and made by the engineers but outside of theories and speculation and countless hours of players trying to solve these mysteries all this time later nothing was ever found it wasn't even until recently that tepig decided to personally take on this bizarre mystery luke and i were hanging out with tepig in an xbox live party when he actually introduced us to some of these mysteries and leads that he had been spending some time reinvestigating and honestly we were really intrigued with the hundreds of theories and links out there from past communities who had tried to uncover the story behind these mysteries we were mesmerized looking through community posts online it seemed like at every turn there was a new discovery or a new theory and with tepig feeling nostalgic to odst and this mystery he decided to double down on re-researching all of this project and even let luke and i tag along to see what his findings would be along the way and we gotta give him credit here because he managed to scrub so many different communities throughout the years for whatever findings they had found along the way and then spent a ton of time catching luke and i back up to speed on what the community knows as a whole so far and where we are right now in a way it was really exciting to reignite the search basing it off of findings of the community as a whole and use this collective research as the base for our own investigation it was actually a late night after a halo livestream that we did when tepig first took luke and i on a walk through of new mombasa and seeing these glyphs up close alongside tepig was actually quite interesting as tepik was able to point out the similarities between certain glyphs and the oddities in some of the others for the most part majority of the glyphs are in this y-shape though in some cases there's these other symbols that are y-glyphs that have smaller glyphs that can easily vary instance to instance and tepik had really noticed that for the most part the glyphs that only have wise without other glyphs around it were often found in areas with dead elites now of course in the context of the greater story of halo it can be assumed that these elites were executed by brutes but technically speaking odst should have potentially taken place weeks before the great schism happened so seeing these dead elites here aren't actually a result of the inner conflict or warfare happening within the covenant ranks just yet this was likely a cold-blooded betrayal and seeing these y glyphs all over the place did have this eerie effect on kind of looking through and trying to figure out what is going on here and what the greater story is and these glyphs the more you start to notice them and look for them you start to realize that there are a lot of them and tepik went through all of the glyphs on all of new mambasa there's actually 266 glyphs scattered throughout tepig counted every single one of them and at first it was a thought that maybe these dead elite bodies scattered all around the new mombasa streets and the y's that often were found amongst them were possibly symbols of the engineers to honor or mourn the elites though tepig kind of put these to rest by debunking them for two main reasons first off the dead elite bodies can only be found in one sector of new mombasa sector six the one in which you actually begin the tayari plaza mission and these bodies actually aren't located in the same spot where you would find them in the tehari plaza mission which only should have taken place about six hours earlier and during the new mobasa streets mission all of them have y signs and sometimes a lot of them too nearby it gets even weirder when you go to this area which we called squidhenge which is really unique because it has this very unique glyph that has the saddest superintendent face on top of it which is one of the rarer glyphs that you don't typically see when you're looking at the standard glyphs along the way this is actually probably what led many people to speculate that the engineers were mourning elites in the first place but when we start piecing together where all these glyphs show up in the grand scheme of odst there's clearly more going on here and this is a unique symbol that we'll come back to in a bit but while we're on the topic of odd glyphs on a different odd occurrence we can actually find these y signs without any dead elites nearby as well and it's also one of the only occurrences where these signs paint the walls outside of sector six which is really interesting because when we're trying to paint together what each symbol could possibly mean finding one odd one out or one that stands out kind of makes us want to draw more attention to it and try to figure out why this specific area is different from all the other ones that have at least something tying them together interestingly enough this time there's this huge empty circle glyph which if we're trying to speculate off of the quote-unquote stories that joe staton said and mind you in his interview he actually said that they specifically involve their forerunner origins these glyphs do at least somewhat possibly remind us of that of a halo ring especially knowing that the paragox are essentially made by the forerunners directly and if we want to look at them kind of in the same way like an inspired hieroglyphic from ancient egyptian times we could also argue that maybe these y glyphs resemble a forerunner y ship or key ship just like the prophet of truth's dreadnought and actually after we finished writing the script for this video i even noticed that there's literally a giant y glyph on the base of the dreadnought during the cut scene in halo 2 which kind of was very obvious to see if you've spent any time at all on odst staring at these glyphs for a very long time still as we're trying to piece together what we know and what these could possibly mean it doesn't explain anything about this empty circle in the courtyard and why is it here in the first place it's just so random that we have a courtyard that has this big circle or halo ring glyph just sitting here so when tepig was trying to investigate this his main idea was to check out the mirror of the courtyard in district 3. now this is something you might have noticed when you're playing through odst and maybe you even gotten lost because of it but due to the way that the game was designed mombasa street's urbanism is actually made up of mirror districts in several sectors which means that they basically will have the same layout in one district as another district and for the most part every district has a mirror version that you also can access for instance districts 3 and 8 are the same this is actually really useful when we're trying to study these different glyphs because we can compare and contrast areas by checking their mirrored section and for whatever reason this courtyard with this unique glyph and y signs without dead elites around it does not have an accessible mirrored courtyard odd out of all of the districts they all had their own mirrored counterpart except this courtyard specifically is completely locked off and we have experienced glitching outside of maps and tepig had no problem finding a way to teach us how to break out of this one but if we attempt to go to the mirrored courtyard where technically the sector should be by breaking out of the map you find that this section just isn't there it doesn't exist instead you get this big black block that just doesn't let you enter okay so some of this stuff might be a lot and it might be getting a little confusing but to fully investigate everything that's going on here we kind of have to nose dive into everything that people have uncovered over the years and keep track of the differences between some of these glyphs going back to squidhenge and remember that was the little courtyard area that had the sad glyph we talked about earlier that was pretty rare there was actually a glitch that some people who were a part of the secret glyph project had discovered now these guys of course were looking into the glyphs and they were investigating as to whether or not possibly those dead elites and the glyphs had some sort of correspondence to each other and they actually found out that if you stack enough grenades nearby dead elite bodies maybe by massively betraying your teammate and just stacking a ton of grenades in a close quarter area and then you fire them all at once nearby some dead elites something absolutely bizarre and somewhat eerie happens [Music] why these bodies rise and stay for a few seconds in an idle position as if they were alive and as if they were almost holding a weapon is really bizarre especially since the glitch does not exist on halo 3 which uses the same engine and actually has living elites in the game that must have been one of the scariest things to ever discover in any halo game when they were trying to find a connection to these glyphs and these dead elites now is this relevant well we don't really have any idea but it's definitely cool and we kind of wanted to include it in this video somewhere because theories exist as to whether or not this could be intentional rather than a glitch and some people speculate that these could be visions of ghosts provided by some engineers and while it's speculation it definitely contributed to this making the investigation here way more fascinating just because of the eeriness behind all of this personally we assume that it's just an odd glitch but it is interesting to think about otherwise and it's something we want to keep in the back of our heads for later on however one big thing that did come out of this glitch or whatever this is it caused a lot of people to investigate the dead elites a bit more to uncover if maybe they do actually serve a role in this mystery for instance if for whatever reason you got one to despawn like accidentally merged its body into a big door after meleeing it for you know like an hour or so in district 8's courtyard that dead elite body will actually respawn at its original location and that's not something that occurs with other props like garbage bins or crates the game wants those elites and tells the game that they must remain in their original spawn location for whatever reason it's a little bit weird well now at this point we were getting paranoid playing this at four in the morning was giving us the heebie-jeebies and we also knew we would have to get into the larger scope of all of these glyphs we definitely needed to dive into all 266 glyphs that tepig managed to log with the halo creation guys and we actually went through to look at all of the different variations along the way to maybe try to put together what they could potentially point us to contrary to the y signs and the dead elite bodies a lot of times the y signs can be found with usually three more symbols alongside them and sometimes just different signs than the usual y can be found in every sector of new mombasa streets now we know tepek had explored mombasa streets both inside and out what tepic found was that the glyphs were always inbound we all jumped in to help him investigate when we could to see if maybe there were some glyphs in the dark areas you know those zones that are blocked out by blue barriers you have to actually glitch into but nothing could ever be found here but fortunately enough tepig went through all the trouble of cataloging each type of glyph to know what type of glyphs we're working with and narrowed it down to seven main types of glyphs now on your screen you see two different variations of glyphs type a and type b glyphs then occasionally you can find the superintendent's face in certain areas like supply caches and then there's this very uncommon looking glyph which tepic calls the super b-type glyph these glyphs while mostly resembling the b-type one of the three symbols is actually replaced by the superintendent's face then besides these types that you see on the screen in a few specific instances there are three more unique types of glyphs throughout lombassa streets we had the sad superintendent that we saw over by squidhenge that empty circle that we suspected maybe was the halo ring over in district 8 and then there was this next one which was really odd this symbol is dubbed the triple superintendent and it's really unique here now this glyph held much of the various detectives from over the years attention for a few reasons these glyphs show up in very few instances and they're typically only ever located in a point of interest whether it be some sort of beacon for a mission a nearby supply cache or maybe it's close to an audio log it makes sense it's pointing to something unless maybe there's something else in one random place the sunken plaza there's an area there with a lot of different glyphs but in this place there are no audio logs no beacons there's nothing important or relevant going on here there's no reason you ever actually go to this area of course not to be confused with hayari plaza which is the mirror version of the sunken plaza yet here is this very unique triple super glyph along with many others so what's going on here for whatever reason and we don't fully understand this yet there's a wall in the lower room at the bottom of the plaza which tends to sometimes show or sometimes hide some additional textures on this specific wall remember this area has no objective throughout the campaign and there is not any audio logs here so this is just a random area covered in glyphs and matter of fact it actually looks like these glyphs are pointing at a door though the door is locked when we clipped a mongoose up to the door to get through the door and surprisingly enough and actually let us in there we were interested to see that this area was even accessible to begin with as like we said you never are over in this area and the only time you would be in something similar is if you're over in terry plaza and maybe playing firefight mode on crater night so the fact we're even able to go in here was interesting but then when we exited the room the way we came clipping back into the mongoose for whatever reason that interesting wall that has nothing on it changes and all of a sudden has a large number four and turning on your visor reveals of course that elusive triple superintendent this did make us wonder that maybe there's this long easter egg path that we might have just jumped into the middle of and whatever we did in those rooms triggered something that caused that wall to load and unload in a specific order but we really don't know why this thing will happen maybe it's a leftover asset from firefight or maybe it's something different but whatever it is it's definitely really odd and things were just getting more bizarre as we continued through this there was a couple of other oddities that we noticed when we were playing through new mambasa that just seemed a bit off to us luke and i had it at one point where i could see glyphs on a wall and he couldn't even though we both had our visor on and then another time we were playing it actually had reversed even though i was the host both times at this point in our investigation we were so hyper focused on reading into anything and everything we could find like cereal boxes on the floor just literally anything that could give us any more clue and then we noticed of course the j signs now for whatever reason scattered throughout the city there are these signs that have the letter j and a bunch of dots that definitely look like maybe some encrypted code and notably there's actually three different variations to each of these signs throughout the city luke and i spent maybe two hours trying to decode them in reverse south african braille and nothing made sense and community members over the years have tried decoding it in various types of braille binary code and other different types of codecs and honestly they didn't make any progress either but there's no way that these signs can exist and not mean anything i'm confident these jsons are a huge part of whatever extra easter egg is out there but this mystery is even more unsolved as literally no one has been able to piece together what is going on with the j signs why there's different variations of them and to this day it's something a lot of people have looked into and no one's been able to make a discovery now despite the differences in all of the glyphs across new mombasa and all of the awesome cataloging that tepic did we kind of were starting to feel like we were hitting a dead end maybe these do just exist as an aesthetic and maybe they're just supposed to be something we can't decipher intentionally and that's just part of the charm perhaps it is the engineer story just told in picture form there's a lot of possibilities but we may never actually know if there is in fact something more that we're just not finding yet of course that was until we found an old email interview from a member of the secret glyph project who was able to discuss with dan miller the at the time campaign designer at bungie and known for his work on halo 3 and odst amongst other games about the search for the easter egg and it gets so much more deeper when explicitly asked straight up if there even was an easter egg behind those glyphs dan miller actually responded saying that secret is also a secret internally with a total of maybe four people in all of bungie that knew about it i don't this stuff was placed by joseph staton i had no role in it oh no while this doesn't give us any more of a lead the fact that he at least acknowledged that there was a secret and that he was at least aware of the existence of said secret and that there were potentially four bunchy employees who did know which means that in his head he knew the names of four people who would possibly knows means that at least whatever the community is looking at is something we just haven't been able to crack the code just yet there's definitely something out there but with every glyph log we're constantly asking ourselves if this is just going to be something contained to just new mombasa or is this something bigger in the game odst or bigger as in something larger than just halo 3 odst then i actually did a small thing a few nights later i was helping luke with some par scores on halo 3 odst and when we were playing on good ol kikowani station trust me i'll always have ptsd flashbacks to some of those challenges we did there in the final area right after the scarab when i was boosting through to the exit in just the corner of the eye i caught the glimpse of more glyphs on the wall and we essentially quickly reloaded the level with tepig and began logging all of the glyphs which actually was something really unique here this is actually the only time in game we see glyphs not on mombasa streets we even replayed all of the odst levels to double check and not even data hive had stuff like this however we did notice in the legendary ending there are also some glyphs in the background as well and we also went through all of the levels broke out of a lot of maps to see if there's anything and nothing was really to be found but the fact that we discovered glyphs on at least another level made us wonder where else can we make connections and where do they all connect to even with the significance of knowing to an extent kikawani may be involved as well we were still running into more walls and then out of the blue chris one of the co-runners of halopedia known as cia391 followed me on twitter what seriously outside of maybe a bungee employee just happening upon luke and i's existence this is probably the best person who could possibly help us with potential leads as halopedia is known for having one of the coolest communities and most well-known communities when it comes to halo's lore so i sent him a dm and the wait was on and not even five minutes later i actually got a message back and boy did chris deliver now mind you this info is coming from someone who has been so heavily ingrained in the halo community for so long and was even involved in many of the conversations and forum posts we studied while looking into all of this this was exactly what we needed to maybe at least give us some direction as to what the next steps should be immediately chris pointed us in the right direction of a massive thing that was right in front of us this whole time and while we were so focused on deciphering these glyphs and where they show up we were undermining our own efforts by really not extending our search chris recommended that we look a little closer to some of the audio logs in the game so of course we knew we would have to revisit sadie's story one more time and see if maybe there were some connections we had been missing now chris actually did us a huge solid and pointed us directly to audio log 23 and andy pointed out some very important things here as it turns out if you actually watch the audio logs during this screen if you look really carefully faded in on the screen you can see various symbols and these symbols not only match up with the same symbols that are on the wall but actually could potentially have a larger role in the bigger halo universe now fortunately enough various members who've contributed to halopedia have actually cataloged a lot of these symbols and now while for the most part connections to most of these glyphs are unknown one stands out for potential similarities as this specific glyph that does somewhat resemble the hud symbol in halo 3 for a regenerator now we don't really know what that could mean perhaps it's a coincidence or it could maybe be a connection to the engineer's ability to manipulate shields we really don't know too much but i wanted to bring it up just in case someone here decides to pick up this investigation and they find another rabbit hole going down that way but it was nice to finally see the glyphs in a place that was completely different from just the walls we've been looking at and at least we can maybe try to break down how whatever is on this section could connect to something else chris also pointed out that there's other forerunner symbols that show up on the same screen and these symbols actually have references that span much further than just halo 3 odst for instance these symbols are more standard looking for runner symbols and actually show up in halsey's journal which was a special edition book for people who pre-ordered halo reach and what's really interesting is that these specific symbols actually are part of the artifact that was crucial in halsey's development of cortana which essentially gave the pillar of autumn directions on where to find that first helo ring why these symbols are showing up here in this random audio log it's really interesting especially if at the time of the audio log taking place we really don't know the details as to whether or not virgil the superintendent had a connection to the engineers just yet so how would he know of this forerunner technology or at the very least why would some of the symbols that showed up on the artifact in halsey's book just randomly show up in this terminal chris also pointed out that these symbols showed up all the way back in a halo 2 promotional poster which of course would have ties to new mombasa and we just don't know where else it goes from here i swear sometimes it feels like we're going absolutely crazy trying to piece together all of these mysteries into one coherent story we still have a lot more to do with this mystery we're fully invested to figuring out what's going on here but we wanted to make this video in hopes to get more people to join us in trying to figure out what is going on and both the rocket sloth community and our discord and the halo creation community who literally this video would not exist if it wasn't for the help of tape here and please please please go check them out and support them but we will all be doing our best to continue this investigation and see where this could lead us because i'm pretty confident there's more here somewhere but we just haven't figured it out yet now as we try to piece together the story so far it's probably a little bit confusing we talked out a lot of things and as a good ods detectives we of course made a detective board out of it i mean we talked about the j banners we talked about dead elites we talked about dead elites that may be related to the y signs except on district 8 because there's no elite but there's a circle glyph over here then there's these other complex glyphs there's the oddity of district 4's sunken plaza and the triple superintendent glyph and then for some reason these glyphs at the end of kikkowani station and then the legendary ending which occurs in data hive then all of a sudden they show up in the sadies story audio log which could have connections to the i love bees arg then there's only four people who know about it confirmed by dan miller cia 391 points out that some of these glyphs go on beyond odst into halo reach and further i mean we're still investigating in this dark city after 11 years and that's quite unique that even after playing so many times in this small game it really seems like some of the words from music composer martin o'donnell you're alone you're in the city you're trying to unravel a mystery that's that's the feeling you have every time you're the rookie remain just as true as they were at the very beginning 11 years ago [Music] [Music] so so [Music] you

Channel: Rocket Sloth

Views: 462,654

Keywords: rocket sloth, halo 3 odst, halo 3 odst easter egg, halo unsolved mysteries, halo easter eggs, halo mysteries, halo myths, halo 3 myths, unsolved easter eggs, unsolved easter eggs in video games, unsolved Halo easter egg, halo, halo hidden rooms, halo secrets, halo 3 secrets and easter eggs, halo 3 odst secrets, secret glyph project, halo secret symbols, halo 3 odst glyphs, unsolved Halo 3 ODST easter gg, unsolved easter eggs solved, halo easter egg solved, bungie easter egg

Id: bBuP039tzjQ

Length: 29min 17sec (1757 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 21 2020