Luke Smith has posted an interview with Freeverse’s Bruce Morrison over at Bungie.net to explain how and why Marathon is coming to the Xbox and the role that the Bungie community played in it:

In 2004 Freeverse hired two new employees, Mark Levin and Bruce Morrison. You might know Mark as “Count Zero” or “HaveBlue” from HBO and Bruce as “Hippieman” from Marathon.org. It wasn’t long after that Mike Watson or “Patient Zero” from Bungie.org came to work at Freeverse and finally Steven Cento from the Myth community joined up in 2006 (He had done contract work for Freeverse for many years previous).

This was the core team to work on Marathon, and with good reason, everyone on the team had worked in Forge and Anvil. Mark worked on Aleph One and Steven had designed Myth tools and was familiar with Bungie’s file format. It was a perfect match. These guys idolized Bungie and Marathon, and they knew how to treat the series with the respect and love it deserves.

Word is that Marathon 2: Durandal was chosen for XBLA because it is “the more accomplished and feature rich game, more modes of play and a better Campaign mode” according to Smith. That’s Bungiespeak for “we still have the source code.”

In addition to the existing movie trailers, today gamer pics, themes, and a trailer for Transformers: The Game hit Xbox Live. Themes are 150 points, pics are 200 points, and the trailers are free. Oh, and yes, there is an “old school” Transformers gamer picture pack. Enjoy.

I’ve captured screens from many, but not all, of the individual scenes within the Halo 3 E3 2007 Campaign Trailer. Some contain things of note that have yet to be confirmed, and others show new versions of familiar objects from the Halo universe.

There appear to be three distinct kinds of scenes in the trailer. Straight gameplay footage is recognizable because HUD elements are present, and gameplay is shown either from the first person perspective if on foot, or in third person if using heavy weapons or a vehicle.

Cinematic footage, or footage of scripted events, is usually recognizable because it presents events that do not occur within the scope of gameplay and are not presented from the perspective of the player, and no HUD elements are present.

It is likely that there is a third kind of footage shown within this video: that is actual gameplay events, presented without a HUD and from an arbitrary camera position, using Halo 3’s Saved Films feature. When the events shown are actual gameplay mechanics, such as infantry or vehicular combat, but the perspective is even further away from the action than when using a vehicle or heavy weapon, and no HUD elements are present, it is likely this is the kind of footage we’re seeing. Rather consistently, Halo cinematics have not included significant amounts of combat, or events that could have been part of actual gameplay, with very few exceptions (the confrontation between Johnson, Keyes, and the Arbiter, for instance).

Click “read more” from the front page for the entire text, which is quite image-heavy.

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