Not all of them. In return for the 19.9% of Bungie owned by Take Two Interactive, that company received all rights to the Myth and Oni franchises. Take Two also received the rights to make two licensed games based on the Halo engine.

Microsoft owns the rights to all other games, including the Marathon series from which Halo is allegedly derived.

Bungie in the past may have capitalized on their position in the smaller Macintosh market to play themselves as the underdog, but business is business. Microsoft offered to make Bungie the premier developers on their new Xbox gaming console, with a large degree of influence over how that platform would develop. In addition to that, being part of Microsoft offers benefits in terms of resources and stability that Bungie would be unlikely to obtain independently.

No official purchase price was ever announced. However, as a publicly traded company, Microsoft must have revealed that number in documents filed with the SEC (Securities Exchange Commission) later that year.

If we can locate that document, we will post the actual figure here.

The rumored figure is between $40 and $50M.

Following the announcement, Bungie made available on its web site a letter to its fans, as well as their own FAQ on the buyout.

Those files are no longer available on the official Bungie site.

A search for microsoft at bungie.net shows the links to the two files, but those links are now dead.

When we find an alternative source for these original files, we will add them to this FAQ.

Yes, it's true.In the summer of 2000 it was announced that Microsoft would purchase the company formerly known as Bungie Software, Inc. and make it Bungie Studios, a part of Microsoft's gaming division under Ed Fries.

As part of the transaction, Take Two Interactive received all rights to the Myth and Oni franchises in return for the 19.9% of Bungie they had purchased in 1999. They also reportedly received the rights to produce two games using the Halo engine.