[image:10099 left hspace=5 vspace=5 border=0] I'm so thoroughly convinced now that Halo 3 is actually being made that I've had the Halo 3 logo tattooed on my own baby-soft flesh, an experience I can assure you is not entirely unlike enduring plasma weapons fire.

While jarring the memory of a long-time source within Bungie, Rampancy came across definitive proof that despite evidence to the contrary, graphical and otherwise, the studio is, in fact, hard at work on developing Halo 3 for the Xbox 360, with a simultaneous release planned for March 2007, along with the Halo movie currently being shot in New Zealand.

[image:10100 right hspace=5 vspace=5 border=0] In fact, our source appears to know something about everything; and we be finding out all kinds of things.

However, the most intriguing bits aren't just about the film (which everyone already knows about) or the game (which nobody has said much about) but about how the two are going to interact with each other.

In selected theaters, ushers will be choosing 16 members of the audience (based on Bungie swag quotients) to be seated in the front row, where each will receive a wireless Xbox 360 controller. Throughout the film, there will be opportunities for these players to impact the direction the story takes by answering multiple choice questions using their controllers. Despite consistent rumors that Cortana might betray the Master Chief and humanity to Gravemind and the Flood, in fact it is the Chief who will be forced to choose whether to rescue or abandon her, with the fate of humanity and the entire galaxy hanging in the balance. The Halo feature film will include seven different endings; which one the audience sees will depend on the choices these 16 people make, much in the way the old Dragon's Lair and Space Ace laserdisc games were played.

[image:10102 left hspace=5 vspace=5 border=0] But that's not all. The film's action-packed climax won't be on a film reel at all. At that point, each of the sixteen players will take up their controllers and assume the role of one of sixteen Spartan warriors, and the ultimate battle sequence will play out as a sixteen-player split-screen cooperative campaign level, generated in real-time in high definition using the Halo 3 engine on an array of Xbox 360s. For this reason, only the largest theaters with digital projection systems will be used. In theaters without such capabilities, and ending will be selected at random and prerendered battle sequences fought by Bungie employees during playtesting will be substituted.

While the actual story of the new Halo game and film are still closely-guarded secrets, we can be sure it will visit delights on the world without equal in history or myth.