Microsoft "Confirms" Spartan IIIs in Halo Reach?

Halo: Reach (Xbox 360)

Last Saturday night, Microsoft and Bungie premiered a purportedly in-engine cinematic for 2010's Halo: Reach (which The Digital Foundry blog at Eurogamer more or less asserted to be true earlier this week). While message boards hummed with speculations about what secrets the trailer might hold, the biggest piece of news may in fact have come from Microsoft PR's press release for the trailer the following morning, when TeamXbox and other sites including IGN made the trailer available to their audiences.

The original text for the press release stated "Step into the boots of a Spartan III and prepare for the first look at “Halo: Reach,” the highly anticipated prequel to the “Halo” trilogy from acclaimed developer Bungie coming fall 2010." However, after posting this article, a number of readers cried foul, asserting that canon made the appearance of a Spartan III at "The Fall of Reach" unlikely (to put it mildly). For those of you who are less familiar with the much-more-complicated-than-you-think Halo lore, Spartan IIIs were a successor to the Spartan IIs (which include the Master Chief, whose official designation is John-117), which had a less stringent screening process, and whose SPI armor lacked the energy shields of their predecessors but featured a rudimentary form of optic camouflage. The Spartan III program was the subject of the novel Halo: The Ghosts of Onyx, which indicated that all but a few of the Spartan IIIs died during their missions, with the last known few stranded in a dimensional pocket known as a "Dyson Sphere." An image of the Spartan III SPI armor can be found below (image courtesy of Halopedia):



It's clear that this armor appears nowhere in the Halo: Reach cinema. Because of this, TeamXbox actually responded to comments on the posting and "fixed" the title and text of the announcement shortly after it was posted. However, we have since received requests from Microsoft PR to correct our adjustments to the original press release. When contacted for confirmation, Microsoft PR responded that the original press release didn't have any "typos," but declined further comment. All other requests for an explanation have been denied.

So, it would appear that Microsoft have confirmed the presence of Spartan IIIs in Halo: Reach.