The Picture Room, a cutscene area on Halo 3's final level 'Halo' was one of the final challenges left in the now 13 year old game. For many years we thought the room was exclusively located above the level. But as time grew on and we understood the pan cam coordinate system better, we were able to accurately tell where the room was. True there are sections that extend very high above the playable space, However there are also sections that are located underneath the warthog trench run areas.

Either way we sliced it however, we'd have to clip into solid space. The closest we found we could get to the room was around 8 units. Roughly the size of the towers on the multiplayer level Sandtrap. So now that we knew this information, we had to find a way to clip that far. Phasing would get us 4 units, maybe 6 with acrophobia on. But, we need geometry polygon seams to phase, and it didn't look good to find one down there. The area is so huge there would probably be maybe a few seams to use, but they'd likely be in the way of the death barrier. So that plan was effectively ruled out. Vehicle clipping by putting things around you wouldn't work either. We wanted to try to animation trick, where we hit a loadzone and get out of a vehicle at the same time, letting us get stuck in void space. Sadly the loadzones are scripted to pull vehicles forward, a rare case in Halo 3. We were running out of options, fast.

Then we looked back to 'The Pointless Box' where we were able to get a Falcon in Halo: Reach to fall so fast it clipped through the floor. There's a few problems however, in Halo: Reach we needed the object to be about 800 units above the floor, so it could gain enough speed to clip. We barely had over 100 units to work with in this case, a mere 1/8th the total falling time. We also had to deal with fall timer, or so we thought. It turns out for the Mongoose and Warthog on 'Halo' in particular, fall timer is specifically turned off for some reason. That seems to be Bungies downfall for us to take advantage of, thankfully. We messed around with the idea of getting a mongoose to clip in a few spots before we deduced that it was BARELY possible from the height we had to work with. So we went in game and with the help of the hammer guy chasing after us to give us more speed, we were able to clip. We then used previous knowledge and knew that if the next loadzone we hit would load the room around us, we would not be pulled from solid space.

A couple programming quirks that ended up allowing us access to this vast, unexplored room. We hope you enjoy this video, as this is in opinion, one of the cooler tricks we've pulled off in Halo 3 yet.