by Noctavis

We've got the Bungie press kit from E3, scanned in and ready for your viewing pleasure. Each image is between 120K and 220K, so it may take a little bit of time to get through the entire thing. Here's a listing of what you'll see:

The Cover - It's a beaut.

Table of Contents - (Pages 1)

Here's a listing of a number of the post-E3 articles that are currently out on Halo or Oni. Some have doubtless already been reported by other sites and only a few include information for avid Halo or Oni fans that wasn't already covered in our news and forum reports earlier.

HALO @ E3

• 3DPortal.Net - A small preview based on the movie.

Transcript from the second public (Bungie.Net) acquisition chat

Posted by Noctavis

Our thanks goes out to Angel, who worked hard to save the text from the brief chats performed by Matt and Max on Bungie.Net last night. She reports this as the exact words of Matt and Max during the periods that either room was squelched.

Matt Soell (head of customer support) - BNAbuford (login: bnabuford) :: The Blind Steppes

Editorial by Ferrex (Dead)

I have a confession to make. As of the time of this writing, I still have not seen Star Wars: Episode One. This is due, in no small part, to the remarkable speed with which our local theatre has not brought it in. C'est la vie, I guess. Still, as I desperately try to avoid spoilers, I've listened to the reactions of people who have seen it, and one comment seems to seems to stand out: It was good, but not that good.

First off, many people are wondering why there should even *be* aconnection. I wouldn't wonder myself, if it weren't for a comment by MattSoell (sp?) of Bungie:

Articles relating to one or more Bungie games.

According to Microsoft's PR material, the console gaming market is approximately three times as large as the PC gaming market (about 30M compared to 10M). In addition, about 7M of PC gamers also own a console machine.

Therefore, the opportunity to develop for a console platform offers a much larger customer base, in addition to simplifying development by assuring that all users' machines will be exactly the same, limiting compatibility problems.

The Xbox will be Microsoft's first foray into the console gaming market. It will be based around an Intel Pentium III processor with a custom set of graphics chips produced by nVidia, a slimmed-down version of Windows 2000, and 64MB of main memory shared with the graphics processors. It will have HDTV output capabilities and an ethernet port. More information is available at xbox.ign.com and planetxbox.com

It's still unclear exactly what all the events were leading up to the retraction of the announcement of Halo for MacOS and Windows and then the following reconfirmation of same. It's rumored that Apple CEO Steve Jobs had something to do with it, which is possible since Halo was first announced at MWNY 1999 by Jobs himself. It's likely he had some strong feelings about a game developer given so much attention at an Apple event subsequently being purchased by Microsoft and cancelling all Macintosh development.

What platforms Halo would eventually be released for was in a state of extreme doubt during the period between the announcement of Microsoft's buyout of Bungie and MWNY 2000. There were indications that although Microsoft was willing to let Bungie make all platform decisions, that the process of making the game the best it could be for the Xbox would be technically incompatible with developing versions for either Windows or the MacOS.

However, at MWNY 2000 Alex Seropian announced that Halo would still come to the Mac, and it was later confirmed for Windows as well.

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.