In the spirit of Easter, and most of you scoffing your faces with delicious chocolate eggs, we thought we’d compile a list of our favorite Halo Easter Eggs across all games in the franchise.

Before we start, if you are unaware what an easter egg is, it is usually something hidden in a video game that the developers placed for a bit of a joke. Halo is filled with a huge amount of these, and if you know Bungie, you know they have a pretty great sense of humor when it came to them.

Ray “CyReN” Smith

One of my favorite Easter Eggs comes from Halo: Combat Evolved called the “Thirsty Grunt”. As a young fan I would constantly replay the Campaign since it was so fresh and so different at the time. I remember coming across this stray Grunt at the end of The Maw and he would randomly just started talking, I really had no idea what to think of it at the time. After some quick Googling I found out it was an in-game Easter Egg, it blew my mind at the time.

Rhys “Moa” Weir

My favorite Halo Easter Egg of all time has to be the hilarious message you get when you attempt to flip the Elephant in Halo 3 on Sandtrap.

I first got Halo 3 when I was 11 years old back in Christmas of 2007(that’s right, I’m a Halo 3 kid). Like pretty much everyone else, I’d visit the Bungie.net forums and talk about the game and head over to YouTube to look for cool things to do. The one thing that every single person who ever owned an Xbox 360 knew about, was flipping the Elephant.

So I went into Forge and I tried a variety of different ways to flip it… Scorpion in the back, drop pod in the back or even 50+ explosives in the back on instant respawn. Every single time, the payoff was worth it.

“Hold RB to flip… wait what? How did you do that?”

Bungie always had a great sense of humor when it came to their games and this was by far one of the best.

John “Unyshek” Junyszek

My favorite Halo Easter Egg is the Energy Sword hidden on the Halo 2 mission, Outskirts.

I used to run around the outside of that map for hours, jumping from rooftop to rooftop. These hours of jumping were my way of investigating the best way around the map so that I could beat it on Legendary as quickly as possible. Eventually, I found this a cracked building, fell down into the room, and found an energy sword! Since this was one of the first Easter Eggs I had ever seen in any video game (combined with the fact that I found it entirely on my own), it quickly became my favorite Halo Easter Egg.

Jarrod “Clicked” Dunfee

Halo is known to have a ton of obscure easter eggs, but one of my favorites is the “Half-Naked Guy” egg. The Half-Naked Guy is in fact Jason Jones, co-founder of Bungie Studios. In the last level of the Halo 3 campaign, there is a secret area at the very beginning of the level.

On one side of the room, you have a secret terminal for a Halo achievement, but on the other side, there is an opening that seems to lead to nowhere. If you look closely, there is a small platform that can just barely be reached with a well timed grenade jump. After one final jump into another secret room, you will see Jason Jones bouncing up and down in the corner.

The reason why this easter egg is my favorite is because of how difficult it was to get to the secret room. I remember loading up the Halo 3 campaign with a friend after hearing about this easter egg on the internet. The jump to the first platform felt like it was the most difficult jump in Halo history.

After failing over a hundred times, I finally overcame the obstacle by jumping off of my friend’s head and pushing myself forward a little bit more with a grenade. Trust me, it’s a lot easier said than done, but totally worth it.

Ryan “Infinity” Cox

My personal favorite secret in any Halo is absolutely Rooster Teeth’s Halo 3 easter egg.

Red vs. Blue is something that has helped define everything that is Halo machinima, and therefore the creators got their own personal egg in Halo 3.

During the ‘Crow’s Nest’ level of campaign, if you stray off the normal path of the mission, you can find a door at the far end of the level.

If you continue to listen to the soldier standing and banging on the door, you’ll catch a conversation that is quite hilarious. Featuring the voices of Simmons, Grif, Caboose, and more, the conversation you hear will vary based on the difficulty you selected.

If you haven’t seen this egg already, check out all of the possible conversations. I still stop by this door every time I decide to play through the mission.

Andrew “Andy” Marx

Do I really need to explain why this is my favorite? Not only is it the one and only Marty O’ Donell, (Who has unfortunately parted ways with Bungie) but he’s also dancing, with hearts.

The story goes that one day Marty interrupted an animation shoot. Not only did he interrupt it, he also tried to be funny by doing a little jig in front of the camera. Pat Jandro, the Senior Cinematic Designer at Bungie instantly knew what he had was gold. A few Bungie employees managed to quickly get something together and spliced it together with Marty’s own Siege of Madrigal easter egg.

Marty never knew this was actually going to be in the game Marty held a contest to reward the first person to find his Siege of Madrigal easter egg. When he got the footage he gathered some Bungie employees around to show them, but what he saw totally surprised him, he had no idea. And thus, a legendary gif was born.

Joseph “Saucey” Bentley

My favorite Easter egg is stumbling across these guys below in Halo 3…with a teddy bear. My friend actually introduced me to this gang of lovable cavemen while we were playing co-op on Sierra 117 and I could not believe they were actually real, and in the game.

There were plenty of amazing Easter eggs throughout the Halo series but this one really sticks out to me just because of the reaction I had when I first saw them. Also the teddy bear.. why do they have a… never mind. Hopefully we see a new teddy bear armor ability in Halo 5, I wouldn’t even be mad.

So there you have it. That’s some of the Beyond staff’s favorite Easter Eggs from the Halo franchise and we’re curious, what are yours? Are you a fan of the semi-naked Jason Jones in Halo 3? We want to know. Let us know on our forums.