Hmm. During the setup for the Bungie Fanfest yesterday, we ran across some signs left over from the E3 booth. Some had strange names… we speculated on them between ourselves, but couldn’t come up with any answers. SiliconDream, however, must have done his homework after E3… because you can find lots and lots of info about the more esoteric signs (not even shown in the photos Freewill put up last night) in this forum post. Have we gotten a big clue about the physical location of the Halo? (Seems mighty close to Earth, if you ask me…)

Thanks once again to Luxor, of the Vault Network, who found this Microsoft press release that confirms Bungie’s commitment to bring Halo not just to the Mac, but to PCs. Silly rumors going around… as Ed Fries says,

“We are particularly pleased to honor Bungie’s commitment to make ground-breaking games like ‘Halo’ available to gamers on all platforms, including the Macintosh.”

Shame on all you doubters!

For those who missed our MacWorld NY 2000 page,we’ll point you over to the Day 1 wrapup, which includes a movie capturing Alex Seropian promising Halo for the Mac to all b.org fans. Check it out!

fAT1 has posted a requeston our forum for someone willing to post Halo news to a British gaming site. Check it out… could be fun!

Light news day today… all day at MacWorld, with very little Halo news! Keep your eyes peeled, though, for tomorrow is the Fanfest!

Spotted by luxor, of Halo Vault: In the press release for the ATI Radeon card (dated July 17, 2000), ATI touts Radeon’s gaming prowess by listing some of its “unique features”:

“3 Texture Units – The only card on the market to support 3 texture units, RADEON will speed through games such as Microsoft’s Halo^TM since it can render multiple textures in a single pass”

Makes you wonder who they talked to, before this morning’s announcement…

Wow… hard to find a place to update from the show floor sometimes. As you may or may not have read on other sites, the news from the show is positive… Alex Seropian and Ed Fries HAVE confirmed that Halo WILL ship for the mac. I got a chance to snag Alex after the keynote, and he told me that their commitment to develop for the mac has never wavered, but that they couldn’t announce that before today. He said that while the Mac (and presumably PC) version won’t ship until after the Xbox version… they WILL ship. (He also suggested that Jason Jones might not be the project lead for the Mac port.) And to think we doubted them!

Just a heads-up… the entire HBO staff is either at MacWorld this week or on vacation (yeah, we know, bad timing), so updates will be less frequent than usual. We’ll do our best to get some info posted from the floor at MW, but no guarantees. Mail, too, is difficult; we ask you to be patient with us.

Czar Vegeta Renada writes to tell us about roleplay.halowar.com,a new website in which you must roleplay a player character to be allowed to stick around. Interesting concept… take a look!

Thanks to Todd Hansen, who noticed that the b.net servers came back online at about 2:15 Bungie Time. Oops! OLD Bungie Time, that is. (Central Time, for all you fuddyduddies that live in the real world.) Myth, anyone?

Bungie returns from the limbo of cross-country moves… bungie.com is back online (although bungie.net doesn’t seem to be yet), and Matt Soell checks in to let us know he’s alive and settled into Redmond, more or less. Oh, and Marty O’Donnell takes potshots at Seattle’s weather. Gettin’ back to normal!

Halo-Net, one of the early Halo sites, has decided to call it quits. Alan Stott, AKA Flashback, has put up a short page explaining his reasoning… we wish him the best of luck in his future endeavors. (Thanks to Yrro, of Halo Center, for the heads-up.)

|CARNYL| sends word of an interview with Lee Rossini, Brand Manager at Sierra Studios, over at Tribal War. Lee is in charge of all the marketing for Tribes 2. When he was asked,

“Okay. It’s time for a practical exercise in marketing. I’m a fan. You’re the marketing expert. Convince me why I should purchase Tribes2 over HALO.”

he answered with some information that might or might not get under your skin.

Well…for starters, each game has their own strengths..the Halo marketing person can point out things about Halo that we don’t have just as easily as I can do the same about Tribes 2. That being said, I think there are some very cool things about Tribes that should be mentioned when it comes to choosing it over any FPS action title. First, Tribes itself was truly an innovative title..it redefined team-based multiplayer action. Second, Tribes 2 will be even more revolutionary. Dynamix is putting together a game that is designed from the start to build community.and teamplay. With the in-game and out-of-game communications features, killer community building tools, and awesome teambased play, Tribes 2 will be the ultimate team-based action title. Third, we should have at least 50+ players in the game at once. Nobody is doing what these guys (at Dynamix) can do..yet.

You make the call… will Tribes 2 beat Halo for the “ultimate team-based action title” moniker?

The Halo SETI Marines, far from fading, continue to advance on that 46th position. At the current pace, it will take about 2 more weeks… but TidBITS WILL fall. Crunching continues apace, with almost half the team members submitting at least one unit this week. And watch that Banzif II… the winner of the Frogblast Award is on a roll to climb again! Check the 7-day stats for all the details.

Attacked by the Covenant! Almost all of bungie.org (including, obviously, this site) went offline on Sunday morning, 4 am UTC. Finally, almost 48 hours later, we’re back up and running. No, this had nothing to do with bungie.net or bungie.com going offline… those events happened because those servers are moving from Chicago to Redmond. And no, it had nothing to do with Microsoft shutting us down… it was a nasty nor’easter that killed two repeaters and a large chunk of underground cable. Our upstream provider seems to think all the problems are solved. We hope so. Apologies for the downtime.

This one’s for Marty. Xbox IGN have an interview with Chanel Summers (Xbox Audio Manager) about game music on the Xbox. Here’s a quote:

I see that music for Xbox is going to be amazing, and it’s going to really take off, because as I said audio for console games has not traditionally been great. You’ve got a lot of talented composers out there, but they’ve had to work within a small box with other consoles. And here, we’re giving them all the tools, technology and room so that they don’t have to make compromises, they can just concentrate on making great content. And that’s what they should be doing, and that’s why we say that the Xbox is a composer-driven platform.

Looks like Marty is in for a treat. 🙂

John Carmack (id Software) provides further details about his position on the Xbox Advisory Board in a Slashdot post. John ended with these comments:

In any case, talking with MS has no bearing on my development decisions. I’m still using OpenGL, and we are still planning simultaneous releases for linux and MacOS-X. If things work out well with X-Box, that may be added to the list.

Sounds good.

Peter Hogan has sent in a new wallpaper for our Wallpaper page. Check it out!

In honor of the PCZone scans, we’ve updated our Concept Art page to include all concept art released recently.

Our agent in Holland was finally able to get his hands on the PCZone Benelux July 2000 issue, which contains the first of a multi-part Halo preview. We’re still working on permission for the full scans (and a translation), but there were a few new bits of concept art in the spread, including some drawings of the monkey-like creature first seen in the bTV day 4 footage, and a very nice early sketch of the dropship, done by Marcus Lehto. (Yes, we asked about these.) You can find these on the Magazine Shots page of our screenshots section.