: This is a thing with all popular fiction set in the future: in the future
: from the fiction, what happened to the cultural impact of the fiction? Why
: has nobody the Doctor encounters ever seen Doctor Who ? I recall reading
: somewhere that Star Trek explained this - once the government realized
: the fiction was coming true, they classified it all. I have a couple of
: possible explanations for Halo .

: Theory #1 is that Halo was never made. This explains a few things - it's why
: nobody points it out, for one thing. It also explains why non-AI computer
: tech seems limited (i.e. 1980s-style computers on warships). Because Halo
: didn't exist, the Xbox failed and the console market didn't play out the
: same. With tech companies less successful, progress slowed and that was
: that.
: Without inspiration from games like Halo, military tech took different paths,
: hence the prevalence of 21C-style firearms and equipment in the 26th
: century.

: My other, more sinister, option is that Halo did exist, but as in Star Trek,
: was classified when things began to match up. People with knowledge of
: Halo work for ONI - ONI knows what's going to happen, because it's
: predicted in the fiction . This explains ONI's secrecy, along with how
: Cortana found Alpha Halo. It also has some disturbing implications
: regarding ONI's failure to prevent the whole thing, given their
: foreknowledge of events.

: Also, the Assembly is absolutely the last remnants of Bungie Studios.

: What do you guys think?

Wait, what are you talking about for Star Trek? They've never tried explaining it, it's clear it's a completely different universe from ours, because right now we'd be in the middle of a world war. They did some stupid time-travel stories that forced modifications to the whole blanket Eugenics Wars of the 1990s idea presented back in the 1960s, but they've never said "There was a prophetic series about where we'd be and we suppressed it."

I think it's basically a given that any fictional universe does not within it contain the work of fiction described. This is fine because that's irrelevant metafictional nonsense anyhow. The only place is starts actively hurting the story are genre films where, for instance, people don't recognize a zombie apocalypse, because that's essentially arguing that an entire category of media never existed.