Stephen Colbert kicked my ass in Halo: Reach

This might sound weird, and I’m still not 100% positive about it myself, but I think I got owned by Stephen Colbert in Halo: Reach last night. Hear me out.

So last night, I was playing Halo: Reach with a couple friends online, playing some Infection and some Big Team Battle when we decided to switch it over to Team Slayer. After a few games we finally got a decent fourth and tore up a couple matches and we were feeling pretty good. I usually like checking out the gamertags of the people I’m playing with in competitive games, just for funsies. A couple good ones that jumped out at me last night were “Pregnant N00b” and “ADedicatedDump,” but this is beside the point.

So anyway, we get into a game and pretty much expect to run train on this group of unfortunate fools. After just a couple minutes into this match, I notice I keep getting killed by this same guy over and over – a blue and red Spartan, with the Pestilence armor effect – who always seemed to have the sword and rocket launcher. After the second or third time of getting killed by this guy, I realize his name is Stephen Colbert and mention it to my friends – one of whom is convinced that it’s the real Stephen Colbert, saying Colbert has mentioned Halo on his show before. I was a bit skeptical to say the least.

First off, why would he just use his real/stage name? I wouldn’t think celebs would want to draw attention to themselves online by using the name everyone knows them by. Secondly, he was pretty incredible. For a guy who seems to work as much as Colbert, I don’t know how he’d find the time to get this good at Halo. Seriously, check out the post game report below. He earned a shit ton of medals too (below next paragraph).

I'm Killface88 at the bottom. There's Colbert, way at the top.

Needless to say, as the game continued, I was pretty intent on hunting down Colbert as many times as I could. Not necessarily because it is (might be) Colbert, but because he’s leading the opposing team. And also because I can’t stand the people who camp the power weapons. And also because he would always use armor lock in addition to camping the power weapons. Seriously, I wouldn’t see him for minutes at a time when, I could only assume, he was waiting for the rockets to respawn.

As the match wound down, I found myself starting to believe it actually was him as well. His Spartan tag was “USA” and his avatar was a red, white and blue elephant. I even left our party for the game’s lobby at the end of the match to maybe see if I we could hear him talking (He was gone the instant the match ended). After checking out his Xbox 360 profile, I was almost convinced it actually was Stephen Colbert.

First of all, his profile was completely blank. People will usually have something in their profile and bio section, yet his was totally blank – almost like those sections didn’t even exist. Even I have something in my profile – a joke from Frisky Dingo (“You can’t fax glitter!” “Well, not with that attitude”). His gamertag avatar also didn’t seem to exist (it was just a blank, black box) but there was one aspect of his profile that made me think this profile was getting special treatment, and therefore belonged to a special person. I noticed his gamerscore was just over 2000 and when I went to compare games, nothing showed up. No games were available to compare and it didn’t even show his total score at the top of the list – just nothing.

Later that night, I took to the net to see if I could dig up anything about the staunch conservative protecting our planet from the Covenant. While I didn’t find anything specifically referencing him playing Halo: Reach I did find this:

Ok…now these ramblings are starting to get some traction. While the above image was just a mockup made by Bungie to try and get a mention on his show, this image surfaced on the net again after Colbert made a reference to Halo on his show, saying Master Chief must’ve been on the Seal team that took out Osama bin Laden. Now, I know you don’t need to play the game to make a Halo reference but it’s a pretty good indicator that he does.

The dude is sick. Just take a look at his ratio and all those medals he earned. The next highest medal earner on their team (Davidson) only earned 18 medals in comparison to Colbert’s 38. Whether it’s the real Colbert or not, just hope you don’t run into him online. If you do, you’ll need an army of bears at your back because Stephen Colbert will own you.