Halo's legacy forums will be missed, especially The Flood

It's the end of an era. In Thursday's This Week At Bungie update, alongside the expected Destiny 2 updates Bungie announced that it's closing its old Halo forums. The forums will be removed on June 28 at 10 a.m. Pacific. "If you need to save anything, get it done before then," archivist Roger Wolfson advises.

The forums have been read-only for some time, but now they're officially getting scrubbed from the net. The Bungie Pro Video archives are also being removed. The only thing left standing will be a trimmed-down version of Halo match records and career pages. At least you'll still be able to brag about your K/D.

The official Bungie forums were a beloved hub for all things Halo, but ironically, I reckon the off-topic Flood forum is what people will miss the most. It's the most active forum by a mile: at 19,426,249 posts across 922,428 topics, it dwarfs the runner-up Halo 3 forum's 11,583,961 posts and 801,483 topics. The Flood's topics include everything from Pokémon to anime to world news to anime again to Justin Bieber.

I think the post that really gets to the heart of what The Flood was about is this one from a member named Hancock, who asks about the benefits of shaving one's armpits and the melting point of cheese. Was Hancock by chance planning to wax his armpits with melted cheese? The world may never know.

Austin freelanced for PC Gamer, Eurogamer, IGN, Sports Illustrated, and more while finishing his journalism degree, and has been a full-time writer at PC Gamer's sister publication GamesRadar+ since 2019. They've yet to realize that his position as a staff writer is just a cover-up for his career-spanning Destiny column, and he's kept the ruse going with a focus on news, the occasional feature, and as much Genshin Impact as he can get away with.