A secret CIA source who asked not to be identified sent along this aerial reconnaissance photo of the Microsoft complex in Redmond. Seems the Bungie offices have already been added. Pax.

The end is here. The Halo SETI Marines lost another big member today (DarthFlounder, with 1210 units), increasing the hemorrhage total to over 2000 units in 2 days. We’ve been processing stats for this team since late October of last year, and we’ve watched it grow from a small group of Halo fanatics to one of the top 50 club teams and one of the top 100 overall teams. That’s nothing to sneeze at… but we aren’t willing to chronicle the descent as people drop out. Therefore, today’s 24 hour stats are the last we’ll put up. The team is far from dead, and could conceivably continue to grow (if, for example, the Bungie team decided to merge with it), but we’re gonna go back to focusing on Halo news. Thanks to all for the last 8 months!

MacGamer’s Ledge have posted a feature called “Former Access Software Employee speaks out on Microsoft relationship”in which a former Access Software employee shares his own experiences after his employer, also a game developer, was purchased by Microsoft. Note: Bungie maintain that they have a different relationship with Microsoft and that Microsoft have learnt from previous disasters.

More Microsoft/Bungie humor from Penny Arcade. Click on the Latest Comic link to see the strip. Thanks to Forensic for the heads up in our forums

PlanetXbox posted the following to their main page:

With the recent announcement of Microsoft buying Bungie we can all look forward to playing Halo on the Xbox! With Halo becoming an X-box title,will it make it to PC at all? Word from inside the company is that Halo will be an X-Box exclusive for a few months, before being released for the PC at a later date.

News to us.

A far more easily read version of the IRC log from yesterday’s chat is now available. This has had much of the extraneous info deleted (comings and goings, nick changes, etc), so if you’re interested in that sort of thing, Halo Vault has put up a complete log, with all that data in it.

Max Hoberman (yeroen), Matt Soell (Proudfles), and ol_dirtae (name pending) showed up in irc channel #bungie this afternoon, and a couple of hours discussed the future of Bungie with the nearly 100 people who attended. Thanks to everyone who showed up… and for those who couldn’t be there, we’ve put up a raw irc log of the event. Hopefully, we’ll manage to format it more attractively in the near future. (Thanks to Harry Al-Shakarchi and James Hastings-Trew, who did a great job keeping the discussion on-target and under control.)

Something about the shock of the last few days has brought out the writer in several. The Fan Fiction page has been updated with not one, not two, but three new stories… go check ’em out! (Thanks to Vap, Myndreach, and Antares for the submissions.)

Yet another Seropian interview… this time with Gamefan. Not a lot new… but how many times can you say “we think we’re doing the right thing” without sounding repetitive? Thanks to Luxor of Halo Vault for the heads-up.

Shugashack and Daily Radar are both reporting that Eidos is shopping around for a buyer, and Microsoft is high on the list. That monopolistic tendency just won’t settle down, will it? Pax.

Blam!… The Halo SETI Marines scrape into 48th place, despite heavy losses. Banzif and Maxaminus take top honors… but it feels wrong. Check the 24 hour stats.

Just for kicks, we compared our traffic yesterday to a random day last week. Seems like a lot of folks stopped by for the MS news. 🙂

	June 12		June 19
Total Visits	2890		7604
Total Pages	5536		13,252
Total Requests	32,291		77,352
Total Unique Visitors	1754		4491

Robert X. Cringely, a columnist for Oregon Public Broadcasting (and the Public Broadcasting System), wrote an interesting article last year entitled “Be Careful What You Wish For.” It suggests that being acquired by Microsoft is not always what the acquiree thinks it’s going to be; it looks at Hotmail as an example. It’s definitely worth a read by anyone who firmly believes that Microsoft will stay totally hands-off of Bungie. Thanks to Peter Kyme for the heads-up on this one.

Rampancy.net has put up a transcript of last night’s b.net chat with Matt and Max. Some interesting stuff in there… seems like it was a little more freeform than the R.net chat earlier in the evening. A snippet:

Why not commit to games for Mac?
Jones is in charge of Halo, and is only willing to commit to possibilities. There’s still a lot for us to learn, and we don’t like making false promises. As for other games, it’s impossible to say what platforms they’ll be on. We made promises when we believed we were being completely honest. This situation changes the circumstances. At the time we didn’t forsee it.

There’s been an awful lot of ranting on our forum about Bungie’s abandonment of the Mac market… It’s important to remember that Microsoft is not saying “you can’t do a mac version” here.

Halo: Xbox Only? Jason Jones, Bungie’s co-founder and the guiding developer behind Halo,talks about Halo and XBox in a Daily Radar interview. Here’s a snippet:

Daily Radar: What platforms is Halo going to appear on besides the Xbox?

Jason Jones: To be honest, we haven’t decided yet.

Daily Radar: Will it be possible to play multiplayer Halo on the Xbox? How many total players at a time?

Jason Jones: Absolutely, yes. And this isn’t a promise, but I don’t see any reason why the Xbox couldn’t handle as many players in a game as a PC.

Daily Radar: Halo was originally designed to be played on a PC. What have you done to handle the transition to gamepads?

Jason Jones: There are a lot of issues, and we’re nowhere near figuring out all of them, but we’ve been playing net games with Interact’s Hammerhead controller for two weeks now — that’s similar to the PS/2controller: dual analog sticks, six buttons, four triggers, etc. — and it’s going great.

Daily Radar: Will multiplayer Halo only be playable on The Zone?

Jason Jones: Nope. Halo will be playable on bungie.net.

Thanks to Blue’s News for the heads up.

The Mac strikes back! As reported on Mac OS Rumors, Foundation Imaging, the company that did Starship Troopers:Roughneck Chronicles TV show (Sci-Fi 6:30AM CST), is to replace all of their NT rendering machines with G4s. Why? They’re faster. Halo fans will notice the similarity between the Roughneck TV show and Halo. Here’s a few pics from their image gallery:

Marine
Dropship
Flame thrower
Marine group shot
Three marines

Thanks to a kind Hotliner, we’ve added most of what was missing from the R.net chat this evening. Some very interesting questions (and answers) early on… so check it again!

Vincent Lopez, of IGNPC, got a chance to speak to Alex Seropian about the changes. You can find the interview here. (Thanks to Luxor of Halo Vault for pointing it out.)

The Question and Answer session on Rampancy.net’s Hotline server got off to a rocky start, but eventually settled down. We missed the very beginning of the actual questions, but we managed to record a large chunk of the discussion. There are some interesting tidbits in here. Visit irc channel #bungie (on EFNET) for another go-round. Thanks to Max, for his graciousness!

Wow. New screenshot at Blue’s News. Who said Bungie couldn’t do trees?