Here is all the backstory you need to know about Halo! Do not read this post if you plan to read "Halo: The Fall of Reach," by Erick Nylund or something like that.

The Master Chief is a Spartan, a genetically enhanced soldier that has been training since childhood. He was abducted from his parents, "fast-cloned," and put into training. Fast-cloning is a technique to quickly clone people to a certain age, but they would develop serious mental problems and die.

Anyway, The Master Chief's real name is John, and he was abducted at five years old. He went through the strenuous training with something like fifty other kids, and when they got to be a teenager, they started doing all these weird genetic mutations, like replacing bone and enhancing brain flow and crap, and half the kids died.

The rest were fitted with that l33t armor, called MJOLNIR, which doubled all their abilities, make them uber-fast and strong. Like, the suit did all the work for them, they just kinda had to think what to do and it did it, much like Dean Kamen's Segway.

So anyway, they were now the human race's last chance against the Covenant. They were at first a secret, but morale around all humans was shitty low, so they made them and their victories public to give humans hope.

All of the human's outerspace planetary colonies were getting "glassed" by the Covenant, some super weapon they have that they shoot from space and I guess covers the planet in glass, killing everything. Now the Covenant were on the verge of finding and destroying the planet Reach, the Earth's last defense between the Covenant and Earth. All Spartans were assigned to defend the planet and like all but three were stuck on the planet when it got glassed, so there were only a few left now.

Sidenote: Why the Covenant hate the humans so much, I'm not quite sure. From what I deduced, they're looking for something. Each time the Covenant find a planet, they search it completely, going through the musuems and crap, and when they don't find anything, they glass it.

Now I'm a bit hazy at this part, but I think a Covenant ship was trying to attack the Pillar of Autumn, and to prevent it, John and the last two Spartans jumped through space to land on the Covenant ship to blow it up, but the other two Spartans were killed or stuck when it blew up, so therefore, Jon, the Master Chief, is the only Spartan left.

Then the game Halo takes over.

This leaves a few questions for me...

If I recall, the two peeps that were influential in raising John and the Spartans, are also raising another group of Spartans, so maybe we'll see that in Halo 2. Also, I'd like to know if the Covenant have glassed tons of other planets, why don't they do the same in Halo 2? There must be more of a reason to this war other than the inferiority of humans. WHAT IS IT THEY'RE LOOKING FOR?

I hope I helped some; if I fucked up, please correct me.