A recent back-and-forth in the HBO forum, as well as numerous references to quotes involving Halo, possibly Halo 3, and release dates in the past year led me to want to try and collate a bunch of these references.

First, let's take this quote from Robbie Bach at Microsoft:

"We're going to ship it when it's ready. [...] You have to be careful with franchises like this."

That sounds like Halo 3, doesn't it? Sound just like what Bach said about Halo at X05, right?

Wrong.

That was about Halo 2, back in January of 2004. The upshot? Halo games get released "when they're ready".

Is that true?

This phrase goes way back in Bungie lore, as the company, historically speaking, did not give release dates, but released games when they were ready-- box manufacturers and coffee machines notwithstanding.

Wait, how about this quote from Bach:

"Bach said Microsoft's focus now is on more-lucrative game sales. The heavily anticipated [Halo sequel] is expected next spring, and a sequel to the successful "Project Gotham Racing" is set for this fall."

That might be about Halo 3, right? Except, no, I've given it away with my edit. That one's about Halo 2 again. So there's Bach saying Halo 2 was expected in the Spring. He was only six months wrong.

Well, perhaps that's evidence that it's true-- that Microsoft doesn't want to stifle the goose that laid the golden egg, and allows Bungie the resources and time they need to make each Halo game.

Except that theory is really hard to swallow.

Halo 1 was released as a launch title back in November of 2001. As brilliant and successful as it was, there were those who said the deliberate revisiting of locations in that game bespoke of a need to finish it quickly. Bungie had only been purchased by Microsoft just the year before, and had spent their time developing the game for Macs and PCs. As recently as E3 that year, major portions of the game (namely AI) still didn't even exist. They had approximately a year and a half to simultaneously finish the game and retool it for the new platform.

Is that giving Bungie time? I submit, no, it is not.

I Would Have Been Your Daddy

Would Halo 1 have benefited from extra months to gain some polish?

Yes, I believe it would have. And not just in the same way that almost anything benefits from more time. As Steve Jobs once put it, real artists ship. And Bungie are real artists.

Halo had already been in development for awhile when revealed to the public in 1999. In fact, at MacWorld in New York that summer, Jobs announced that Bungie would deliver the game the following spring for the Mac and PC platforms. Whether he knew what he was saying or not, the game had been in development for some time.

If one marks Halo 2's development from when Halo 1 shipped, then Bungie had 3 years. Even so, there are signs it, too, would have benefited from more time. Some said the campaign was too short. Even though it has levels which dwarf those in Halo 1, a lot of those extremely large areas are blocked off from players by invisible walls. They look large, but the playable portions are not as large as the whole level is.

Bungie personnel on the LE DVD mention wanting more time. If Bach's quote about Halo 2 being slated for a spring 2004 release were on the money, it may be true that they got that extra time-- even thought it ate into time the company could have used to start developing an Xbox 360 title.

But November 2004 was the beginning of what Microsoft must have known even back in 2003 would be the swan song for the original Xbox-- the last holiday season. Halo 2 would be the last, best chance for a huge seller on that platform before the Xbox 360 takes the center stage. Unless Halo 2 could be retooled to take advantage of the Xbox 360, there would be little point in releasing it later than the 2004 holiday season. Not only that, but the I Love Bees promotion was already in full swing by that summer, leading up to chances to play the game prior to release. To delay it any further would mean losing the momentum generated by that campaign, losing whatever share of the holiday shopping dollars Halo 2 would have ended up garnering, losing a chance for underscoring the potential for success within the entertainment division of the company by having a spectacular and profitable (if singular) quarter.

For many reasons, Halo 2 needed to come out no later than holidays 2004. None of those reasons have anything to do with "when it's ready".

'They Walk Right Into Halo 3'

Then we come to E3 this year, where Bill Gates says that Halo 3 will be ready to counter Sony's PlayStation 3 when it launches.

That launch, it is expected, will be sometime next year, perhaps as early as next spring-- a mere 18 months after the release of Halo 2.

Halo 3 going to be ready then, do you think?

No, probably not. And probably Gates can't make it so, no matter what he does. But that's not the point. The point is that this demonstrates that there are forces within Microsoft-- some very powerful ones atop Micrsoft's structure-- that have reasons to try and manipulate the release date of Halo games to serve business interests that may, at times, be at odds with Bungie's interest in making the best game. And to believe that Bungie is immune to these forces, that the release dates of past Halo games has not been affected by these forces, that the release date of future Halo games also will not be affected by these forces-- this is naive.

The Halo3 - PS3 matchup had already been discredited, despite Gates' pronouncement and with no official retraction from him, when in June, Kikizo interviewed Microsoft's J Allard started with the "when it's ready" quotes:

We're never going to ship a Halo game (if we were to make, hypothetically, Halo games in the future) - we want to have the Bungie team - we want to give them the amount of time they need to create the product that they envision.

The understood words in Allard's quote-- the ones he is careful to not actually speak-- are "before it's ready".

Was Halo 1 shipped before it was ready? Was Halo 2 shipped before it was ready? Might Halo 3, also, not be shipped before it was ready?

No, says Allard.

And that is exactly what Robbie Bach expects Halo fans to believe, with what he said after Gates' E3 pronouncement:

We haven't announced anything on what Bungie is doing or where we're going with the future of the 'Halo' franchise. With all respect to Bill, I don't run Bungie's studio, and neither does he.

It's true that neither Bach nor Gates runs Bungie Studios. However, Microsoft owns Bungie Studios. No one should mistake where the buck stops.

'We'll Ship When It's Ready'

More recently, Bach was quoted at the X05 event, delivering a similar line to the "when it's ready" remark about Halo 2 back in 2004:

"Halo is something we'll ship when it's ready."

The quote, as Bach delivered it, doesn't even say "Halo 3", it just says Halo, although that didn't stop many news sources from inserting it for him, and the rest of the world from assuming that's what he meant to say, and that the 3 was omitted solely for the purpose of admitting that the game hasn't even been announced by Bungie yet.

This quote, and the Eurogamer article that it came from, as well as the myriad of similar articles that reported his remarks later, prompted me to call them "Old and Inaccurate" in a post on the HBO forum.

They're old; Bach has said them before about the Halo franchise. They're inaccurate, because they beg Halo fans to be so naive as to believe that no business considerations, but only creative requirements, determine the release date of the games which, to date, form the only proven system-selling franchise that exists on the Xbox platform.

It wasn't the complete truth when Bach first uttered it in 2004, and it's no more true now. The only saving grace is that given when Halo 2 came out, it's impossible for Halo 3 to be a launch title, so fans are spared having that portion of the series be unduly rushed.

Will Microsoft really allow Bungie all the time it needs? Even if that means more time than the three years they got for Halo 2? Even if Perfect Dark Zero, the Xbox 360's flagship shooter so far, fails to impress? Even if the Halo feature film is ready first? Even if Xbox 360 sales don't meet expectations? Even if the PlayStation 3 hits the ground running next year and overcomes the 360's sales figures? Even then? Are we to believe nobody is going to come knocking at Bungie's new doors in Kirkland, begging for Bungie to rescue the platform it nearly single-handedly built?

Are any or all of those events probable? I can't say. Surely, Microsoft is betting that they won't happen.

Are they possible?

You bet.

You can also bet that yes, Halo 3 will be released when it's ready.

And it'll be ready when it needs to be ready, according to the people who get to decide what "ready" means at Microsoft.