We get mixed messages from Bungie about the whole F/H thing.

[quote=Narcogen]Is this official backstory given to AKQA by Bungie, or something they came up with themselves?[/quote]

Good question.

Maybe a better question is how on earth could an agency working for Bungie come up with something non-canon themselves?

What would the brief be? 'Make a viral campaign, mention the Humans and Forerunners, just make something up. Mention genetics, thanks.'

The agency may reply, 'Do you want to check this stuff to see if its accurate?'

Bungie, 'Nah, we're really busy right now, do what you think is best.'

When people talk of canon and non-canon I think they must be thinking of a scenario like the one above.

Can we pile all the blame on Microsoft? Did some faceless MS staffer 'coordinate' with the agency? Or are the peeps at Bungie really unable to give clear instructions and to check the output before it is released?

Or are the guys at Bungie as confused as the rest of us? Game development is a collaborative process, maybe a lot of people have had input into the story bible. Does anybody at Bungie know for sure what the whole Forerunner/Human angle is?

Maybe there are a lot of people at Bungie who are certain that they know the story. Unfortunately maybe they all know a different story ;-)

But seriously Narc, do you think we are confused because we are stupid, or we haven't been given enough info, or we have been given contradictory info?

[quote=narcogen]AKQA, the company responsible for last year's award-winning IRIS ARG promoting Halo 3, has put up an extensive presentation that summarizes and details each step of the game.

In episode 4, the summary reads in part:

The fourth episode continued to provide hints at the previously unknown Halo backstory, including the shocking reveal that Humans and Forerunners share an ancient biological connection.

So, is that it? Are humans and forerunners somehow related? Are Humans surviving Forerunner, left behind somehow when the latter moved out into space? Is Earth a lost Forerunner homeworld? Do they merely share a common lost ancestor-- the Precursors, perhaps? Were both species, Human and Forerunner, seeded by some other, unknown source? Is this official backstory given to AKQA by Bungie, or something they came up with themselves?[/quote]

I speculated that Forerunners were Humans who had been taken from Earth and given the Mantle. In our reality, Human DNA is definitely of this world and we obviously evolved here. Earth is our homeworld, our birthplace as a species.

I learned somthing new (to me) by following your link, there is a suggestion that, [b]in the Haloverse[/b] Human DNA is foreign to Earth.

Are we a [i]lost colony[/i] of Forerunners? Or are we just another race that the Precursors [i]tinkered with[/i]?

I think that the idea that the Hierarchs-were-killing-their-Gods-to-preserve-their-religion is watered down if we aren't really all that closely connected with the original Forerunners.

OTOH sins of the fathers makes more sense if our 'fathers' were the Precursors.

I have been fortunate to complete all of the games and read all of the novels. All that remains is to read the graphic novels. That being said, from what I have learned about the Forerunners, they also had the ability to manipulate time and space. Wouldn't it be possible that humans in the game were placed in current time and place to save them from some sort of disater? This happened in several instances in the novels where charaters were saved by being placed in time coocoons. Imagine the power it would take to displace an entire universe. Or from the other perspective, the entire Forerunner civilazation left via the same time coocoon. This is not canon, just a guess.

Just my 2 cents.