Bill Gates is quoted in this month's Time Magazine, featuring the Xbox 360 on the cover, as saying that when the PlayStation 3 launches, it will "walk right into Halo 3."

In last week's Weekly What's What Update, Frankie said:

We're quite some time away from announcing what our next game is and for which platform.

This is a very curious quote on a number of levels. While Bungie has, on many levels and in many persons, insisted on having no less autonomy after becoming part of Microsoft Game Studios than they had before, most detached viewers would have difficulty swallowing this idea. Indeed, the company that historically never gave release dates and produced games for Macs or Macs and PCs, since 2001 has released two games on release dates virtually dictated by the parent company and only for the parents' flagship platform, the Xbox.

One can only assume that Frankie's comment means they aren't sure whether Bungie's next game is for the Xbox or the Xbox 360. Or could it mean more than that? After putting Microsoft's gaming console on the map, could they be headed back to doing PC games?

Bungie has, in the past, done strategy franchises as well as action games. Strategy games are notoriously difficult to execute on a console because of the controls. While many critics scoffed at playing FPS games on consoles, nobody does anymore. However, it's difficult to imagine playing a game like Myth with a gamepad.

Beyond the question of platforms, though, how do we reconcile Gates' statement that Halo 3 will be released simultaneously with the PlayStation 3, and Frankie's comment that Bungie's next game won't be announced for "some time"?

One could reconcile them this way: Bungie isn't making Halo 3. That's purely speculation on my part, I'll admit. However, there is precedent for it. Bungie's Marathon Trilogy? They only did the first two games. Double Aught, a group of ex-Bungie designers, did the scenario work for Marathon Infinity and built the game on the Marathon 2 engine, supposedly as a prelude to developing their own portal-based engine for a game called Duality that never saw the light of day.

Myth 3 was made by Mumbo Jumbo after the rights to the Myth franchise passed to Take Two in the Microsoft buyout.

Why should the Halo franchise be any different? After having done two chapters, established the world, and built the engine, why couldn't another group, to paraphrase J Allard, embrace and extend the Halo metaphor?