The Halo 2 Secret That Took 15 Years To Discover

Ever since Halo 2 first arrived in 2004, fans have been wondering if it's possible to hijack and fly the Pelican craft in the game's "Metropolis" level. The series has since teased fans with the possibility by allowing players to fly a Pelican in a memorable Halo: Reach easter egg. However, one speedrunner has just discovered that the Reach easter egg wasn't the first time players were able to take a Pelican for a spin. In fact, that option has been available since the original release of Halo 2; you just have to know how to do it. 

MisterMonopoli is a big name in the Halo speedrunning community who is known for his ability to find various glitches and exploits to aid him in faster and faster speedruns. He once held a world record for beating Halo 2 in the fastest time, clocking in at a truly insane 1 hour and 38 minutes. These days, he uploads videos of his different exploits to his YouTube channel, giving fans a glimpse at how he manages to maintain such impressive speedrun times.

In one video, MisterMonopoli showed players how to pilot the Pelican in Halo 2 without installing any mods. MisterMonopoli apparently discovered how to pull off this trick sometime last year. He has a few different tutorials on how to access this secret, and it's naturally a little trickier than one might expect. After all, if it was meant to be done on a regular basis, the developers probably would have made it much more obvious.

MisterMonopili explains that players must enable Envy Skull when loading up "Metropolis" in a local co-op game. The Envy Skull replaces Master Chief's flashlight with camouflage, cloaking the hero. The trick to that is that the game must have been played in Legendary Mode in order to find the Envy Skull, so there's a bit more prep work that goes into this exploit than some gamers may have been expecting.

After that, the trick involves dying and respawning in a few key areas, making sure that the bad guys can't see you as you make your way across a lengthy bridge in camouflage mode. The main thing that MisterMonopoli stresses to viewers is that getting shot during the first half of this exploit is not an option, not even once. In order for this to work, the player must arrive unscathed and with pixel perfect accuracy. There are also a few points that will require players to exit and restart the mission entirely. 

However, you will eventually arrive at an area where the Pelican will actually descend towards you. All you have to do then is hijack the ship with a simple button prompt. Pressing the reload button will result in Master Chief tossing out the enemy out of the Pelican and taking that sweet aircraft for a joyride. 

It's a bit of a lengthy process that will take some trial and error, but as can be seen in the video, it really works. Not only that, but this method will work with both the original release of Halo 2 and the re-release of the game included in The Master Chief Collection.

Needless to say, the comments of this video from MisterMonopoli were full of longtime Halo fans who had their minds completely blown by seeing this exploit in action.  

One fan wrote, "My childhood self is crying from happiness right now." Another fan said that they were going to try this trick out for themselves as soon as possible. In other words, this was like music to the ears of Halo diehards.

This isn't the first huge Halo discovery to be made in recent history, either. Gamers have been finding secret unused areas in games for years, with the Halo franchise being one that obviously inspires quite a bit of excited digging from fans. A group called Termacious Trickosity actually found a way to weasel their way into an actual cutscene. 

Termacious Trickosity discovered that the cutscenes in Halo: Reach aren't pre-rendered; they're actually all stored fully realized in a kind of studio backlot within the game. After clipping through a wall into a void that displayed all of the various "sets" in the game, the team got to work on trying to reach the destroyed Science Wing from one of the game's cutscenes. It took a bonkers seven years of different attempts and careful planning based around how the game processes different jumps, weapon discharges, and loading times for cutscenes. Finally, the team managed to get into the Science Wing without breaking the game. 

In other words, the Halo franchise may never stop offering pleasant surprises and hidden gems to its fans. With the newest installment in the series, Halo: Infinite, set to arrive this holiday season, it should be pretty interesting to see what kinds of easter eggs will be uncovered by enterprising fans.