Rampancy

The crew at Halo Center report that the Editor-in-Chief of Incite PC responded to their inquiry about new Halo footage:

Sorry it has taken me so long to get back to you about this. I'm glad you and other Halo fans enjoyed our video of the game. We are planning to do another video update as soon as Bungie will let us get in there to do it. We're also excited about this game, so we can't wait to go back.

Heh... who wouldn't be excited about a chance to spend some time with Bungie? A good job goes out to R@ge, Flashback and Recoil.

Noticed at HBO was another, more convincing post which continues the recent string of Halo beta hoaxes. This one claimed that Bungie was releasing code to a mailing list to show off the Halo engine's features. For prudence, we tossed an E-mail to Matt. He gave due consideration to the matter and prepared an eloquent response:

My ass.

-Matt

There you have it, straight from Bungie's mouth. Matt's ass is the only place where you can obtain a Halo beta right now.

Really, though: when you see something like this it's a good idea to pause and consider the facts. Halo is barely in the second of three stages of development, and I highly doubt that they would want to distribute their code to the public at this point. Giving the competition an opportunity to dissect and reverse-engineer Bungie's magic before Halo is even close to a release date would not be an intelligent strategy. Bungie barely supplied us with the Marathon 2 source code a few months ago! Here's one, sure-fire method for knowing the truth about this and a number of other equally important matters: Bungie will tell us, themselves.

On Sunday I reported about a clipping from PC Gamer's May issue. PCG made some statements about the delays that Oni has experienced while in development. After a bit of discussion by the fans, Matt Soell had something to say in our forum. Here's a short blurb from that post:

Bungie has been growing steadily, and has doubled in size most years. We couldn't do that if selling games was problematic for us. :-)

Matt's full statement is worth reading. It just goes to show, again, that one can't believe everything that one reads.

• Forum: Re: ...if commercially problematic...

The webmasters you thought you knew. fAt1 of Total Halo sends word that the first in a series of interview specials has been posted, asking a number of webmasters from this little community of ours to sum up Halo in one sentence. Over the next few days, more questions will be posted, and it should be interesting to see what the answers were.