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.