Thanks to Pallor who pointed out in our forum a typically sharp-witted Salon piece on Microsoft's upcoming X-Box gaming console which mentions Bungie, even if it doesn't mention anything about Halo specifically.

Here's an excerpt:

In the hardcore gaming world, Microsoft enjoys a far better reputation -- from the press, programmers and game players -- than it does in other software arenas. This includes Bungie founder Alex Seropian, among the most admired figures in gaming. Seropian says the Bungie team was looking for a publisher that could work with it and its elegant (albeit complex) game titles. We talked to maybe a dozen publishers in the last five years, he says. The Microsoft guys were pretty smart. They didn't want to break what worked ... They believed in what we were doing. What's more, Seropian says, Gates' new gaming console made that offer irresistible. When we started talking to Microsoft, we got the opportunity to be the premier developer of the Xbox.