A track from Halo that didn't make it onto the CD (a fact discovered by Bungie fan Micah Allen) has been added to the Outtakes page at Bungie.net. Kudos to Louis Wu at HBO.

Matt has returned to the HBO forum to disabuse the usual suspects of their delusion about release dates from Electronics Boutique.

Okay, okay... despite flat statements to the contrary from the developer (something along the lines of it is not Marathon 4 , if I recall) and the serious mismatches in timelines and terminology, Game Girl Advance has advanced the theory that Halo really is the sequel to Marathon Infinity, citing the use of the Marathon logo and the basic similarities between the two games. You be the judge.

In ways reminiscent of old-school Bungie fashion, the hunt is on.

Go.

Update: And it's done, by the crew on Subnova Hotline. Just type in .fortune as a Halo profile name, and you'll trigger the egg - a throwback to Bungie.net Myth play. Read through the whole messy process in the chat log here.

Blackstar Productions, which is working on a feature-length Halo fan film, has posted a Q&A about the Halo Movie project; the basics of it are that the movie is so huge it will be available only as a DVD and not as a download, and there will be between 25 and 50 copies that will be raffled off in some kind of contest to be defined later.

Matt Soell at Bungie has put up a short summary of how the Halo Winter Season Tournament is progressing. So far 1,100 gamers have showed up at over 75 iGames centers. The next round begins on December 14. Thanks again to Louis Wu.

Today marks the one year anniversary of the Xbox and Halo, as well as the launch date of Xbox Live. Watch later this weekend for a retrospective on the last year of Halo and a look at what we know so far about Halo 2.

Matt Soell wrote into the HBO forum to say that the novelization of the first Halo game will include information that isn't revealed within the game itself.

A new Halo fan-made video from Crocodile Bungie poked its nose up at HBO. In essence, it's Halo, from opening sequence to closing cutscene... all in three minutes. Very nicely done. We've set up a mirror for your downloading pleasure.

I recently participated in the intitial qualifying match for the Halo Winter Season tournament. My team did fairly good, had fun, and dropped out, though we'll be trying again at the next qualifier. I've blogged my report of it, playing Team Slayer, 4 vs. 4 on Hang 'Em High.

Despite losing in the second match to Thugs n Rebels, Team Overkill still posted a description of their participation in the Halo Winter Season qualifier at Kings Games in Brooklyn, New York. Louis Wu had the story at HBO.

Team Overkill, via Louis Wu at HBO, has pointed out that the Halo Winter Season rules are now posted at iGames.

The Halo Winter Games, whose first qualifying match is this Saturday, has had its gametypes posted at the iGames site. Good to know if you're planning on competing.

Before Halo was even released, fans got a glimpse at what Microsoft's advertising department would think of years later.

Enterprising Halo fan Mark Levin took pieces of the Halo trailer from E3 2000, and edited it to go with the audio track from Budweiser's humorous wazzup advertisement campaign, creating Halo Wazzup [HBO].