Well, it seems while I slept the blissful slumber of the terminally unaware, a couple of bombshells dropped in the Halo universe.

The first was expected: Matt's latest update at Bungie.org. Really not too much here except some praise all around for the good work done by The Bear , Marty, and everyone else. However, there were some hints about easter eggs:

There are many elements of Halo we haven't discussed in public - and we don't intend to start until long after everyone has played the game, lest we spoil a cool surprise for someone. So it's understandable that I haven't said anything about the many easter eggs in Halo. I'm not about to start either - but I will say that it pays to look around. And you haven't really won Halo until you've won it on the highest difficulty level.

And if that wasn't enough, it looks like the new Halo site at Microsoft.com is revealing a lot more of Halo's backstory than was initially planned this early. And as noted by others, there don't seem to be many-- if any-- common points with the Marathon series.

A Bungie.org reader named Chlazza was poking around the site and noticed that in the now rather sparsely populated Timeline area, that there was more content than was displayed... because it was commented out. By poking around in his browser cache, he found a file called arrayxml.xml, which contains the entire text of the Early Conflicts segment of the backstory. It's also been posted at the Marathon Story Page's forum, in case someone at Microsoft manages to pull it-- but as of 10 PM Eastern time on Friday, the file was still there.