Kudos to those readers who have pointed out and sent in this automated reply being sent to anyone requesting information on Bungie's presence at Macworld SF:

An interesting item at IMG today, about an upcoming game that could well be a rival for Halo: WWII Online. Like Halo, the game boasts unified land and air combat (and sea combat, too), and is due for an open beta in Q2 2000.

Not many screenshots to look at, though the descriptions are fairly interesting. The persistant online world sounds like a very ambitious version of Warbirds... one to keep an eye on in coming months.

Just when you thought it was safe to have an online poll... Marathon's Story has pointed out a new poll at mpog.com, asking the question Which game development house has most impressed you in 1999?

Needless to say, Bungie is on that list, and the faithful will immediately know what to do. Unsurprisingly, Bungie is already leading by an impressive margin, but that is only the beginning. Rock the vote, folks!

When lacking content, create your own. Inspired by a discussion on the halo.bungie.org forum, I punched out a sort of introductory article for people new to Halo, Bungie, and Marathon:

Sure enough, I have returned to find my cookie eaten and the forum rife with unmarked new messages. A pox on all your houses. A few interesting items in there, though. Bungie's Matt Soell comments on console compatibility, contributing to a long discussion of the merits of console versions of Halo, and Butcher offers an interesting post on community building.

An interesting note from Bungie's Matt Soell at halo.bungie.org's forum, regarding Bungie's presence at MWSF in January:

Kudos to Christoph Schmidt and halo.bungie.org, who have conspired to post a four page Halo preview from the German December edition of PC Games. Makes me wish my german was a little bit better. Anyone want to attempt a translation, or pick out some interesting tidbits for those of us who can't understand much more than Panzerfaust ? ':)

Despite being a very promising game in its own right, Bungie's upcoming title Oni has been overshadowed in the eyes of some by Halo. Funny to think that a company can actually have too many anticipated products.