In response to a question by Michael Ash in our forum, Marty O'Donnel has posted a public announcement that he'll now be a permanent fixture at Bungie. Read on:

It's beginning to sound like the name Ed Fries is one we might be hearing a lot more from now on. Ed is the Vice President of Microsoft's Games Group. We've learned that PC.IGN has conducted an interview with both Ed Fries and Alex Seropian, the CEO of Bungie Studios. During the interview, Ed explains what made the Bungie acquisition so important to Microsoft:

There is a new interview with Jason Jones at Daily Radar, first reported by Battleground: Halo. It focuses specifically upon the X-Box and why it has become his new favorite development platform. Here's a blurb from the interview:

You have Angel to thank for transcripting the text from chats with Matt and Max at b.net last night before forwarding it to us. She reports that the transcript is very accurate, even down to the typos made. Thanks a ton, Angel!

It started bad, got worse, and suddenly seemed to correct itself when I left to get some lunch. Hmm...

Our thanks to Bungie's Max Hoberman (and Chucky too) for taking a few hours to speak with the 250+ Bungiefen who managed to break the server by sheer weight of numbers three times. But the third time was the charm, and there were no further problems from that point on. An excerpt from early in the discussion:

Heading to IRC for their third public discussion with the community, Bungie's Max Hoberman and Matt Soell will be on IRC today at 4:00pm CST, in #bungie on EFNet. Hopefully, things should go smoother than during the RHL chat yesterday, but regardless of the forecast, we'll have at least two chat leeches in attendance and a log for those of you who are unable to make it.

Time to dust off that old IRC client... it's been quite a while since I've been poking around the EFNet...

The responses to Bungie's acquisition by Microsoft have been pretty mixed... but somewhat more negative coming from the Mac community. Gamers.Com reports some comments on the issue by various Mac users. For instance, Nate Birkholtz of MacSoft took the opportunity to inform the Mac community that they're still around and had the following to say:

GameSpot has posted its own news item on Microsoft's acquisition of Bungie, stating that this deal has probably been in the works since at least March. They've additionally posted up an interview with Alex Seropian, Bungie's CEO. In it, Alex reports that it's too early to be certain right now, but that he doesn't quite picture Bungie as being an X-Box only developer for the future.