.fortune

A Halo: Combat Evolved .fortune message.

.fortune is an Easter egg in the Xbox version of Halo: Combat Evolved, as well as Halo 3, Halo: Reach, and Halo: The Master Chief Collection. In all cases, the egg causes a funny message to appear when ".fortune" is written somewhere, but the egg is more extensive in Halo: Combat Evolved. In Halo 3 and Halo: Reach, giving a map variant the description of ".fortune" will produce the phrase "My modem is on fire". In Halo: Combat Evolved, if the player creates a profile, renames an existing one, or creates a map name and names it ".fortune", a random fortune-cookie-like saying will appear on the screen. In The Master Chief Collection the Easter egg will appear if the player enters the .fortune almost anywhere in the game, including map variants, gametypes, loadouts, clan tags, or even Service ID.

The ".fortune" on the text box will then also instantly disappear. However, if the player places a symbol at the beginning (such as a left parenthesis) to make ".(fortune", and subsequently uses the arrows to move to and delete the parenthesis when finished, ".fortune" will remain, allowing the player to use it as a profile name if they so wish.

Activating the Easter egg in Halo: The Master Chief Collection unlocks the Mystery Achievement.

List of Fortune Quotes in Halo: Combat Evolved

• All your hard work will eventually pay off
• Everything lies in silence
• If anything just cannot go wrong, it will anyway (The first of Murphy's Laws)
• Nature always sides with the hidden flaw. (A subdivision of Murphy's Law)
• Never wear your best pants when fighting for freedom.
• Rest is good, but idleness is its brother.
• Smile when you're ready.
• You cannot fall off the floor. (Another Murphy's Law)
• Your luck is about to change.
• I like beans. (Rare)

Trivia

• This joke was also present on Bungie.net's Myth metaserver.
• The Easter egg is similar to the fortune command found on most Unix-compatible operating systems. Like the fortune command in Unix, the Halo: Combat Evolved egg draws a random quote from a database, albeit much smaller than the lists accompanying most fortune implementations.
• "My modem is on fire" is the Myth / Myth2 username of the developer who inserted the .fortune Easter egg into the Myth game servers, and subsequently Halo. MWC '99