MACWORLD EXPO, NEW YORK CITY--July 21, 1999--Today Bungie Software announces Halo, a game that shatters the confines of typical game environments. Halo is a third-person perspective, sci-fi action epic that takes place indoors, outdoors, in the sky and beneath the surface of a world of astonishing realism and visual impact. Halo was unveiled this morning in Steve Jobs' keynote address to the Macworld Expo.

With no levels or breaks in gameplay, Halo gives players complete freedom of movement over open terrain. Vast outdoor vistas, complete with flora, fauna, weather and celestial events, are complemented with indoor environments of comparable detail and complexity. A universal physics model and persistent objects make events in this world utterly convincing. In this open environment, gameplay is not linear but unfolds in response to the player's actions.

Like most Bungie games, the Halo engine shines with the highest-end realism technologies: real-time shadows, inverse kinematics, 3D positional and ambient sound effects, multipass texture mapping, scalable polygonal models, deformable terrain mesh. Enemy artificial intelligence operates simultaneously on both individual and squad levels, accounting for morale, with the result that no combat situation plays out the same way twice.

The player is a military recon unit of the human race's fledgling planetary empire. Pursued by alien warships to a massive and ancient ring construct deep in the void, the player must single-handedly improvise a guerilla war over land, sea and air, using the arsenals and vehicles of three distinct cultures. Using everything from composite swords to orbital bombardment, driving everything from giant tanks to agile combat aircraft, players wage intense warfare over and under the surface of this world.

The epic single-player game is complemented by a role-based, cooperative multiplayer team game. Playing the humans or the aliens, players will use entirely different skills, strategies, vehicles and weapons to compete in a variety of game types. Three players might take the roles of driver, shotgun and rear gunner of a light, fast all-terrain vehicle, roaring and bouncing over uneven ground toward the enemy fortress, ducking under a hail of fire from alien aircraft screaming overhead. Halo's multiplayer game will be an experience that is as much lived as played.

The product of the team of master craftsmen who created the multi-award-winning Myth and Marathon series, Halo is being developed for simultaneous release on the Macintosh and Windows platforms. Already nearly two years in development, Halo is expected to ship in the year 2000.

Based in Chicago, Bungie Software is a rarity in the electronic entertainment industry, a private corporation dedicated to both developing and publishing outstanding, immersive electronic games that surpass conventional technology and provide compelling and repeatable play. Bungie is currently developing the highly anticipated anime action game "Oni". For more information, surf to www.bungie.com.