Bungie's own Matt Soell was kind enough to exchange a few words with Rampancy recently about the cancellation of the mysterious Project Phoenix.

Rampancy: How far in the development process did Phoenix get?

Matt: This is a tough question to answer. As with the early stages of Halo's development, we investigated and discarded a lot of ideas, which took a long time. We were still a long way from beta.

Rampancy:Was Phoenix its own engine, or based on Halo?

Matt: The original basis was the Halo engine, but like Halo (which began as an evolution of the Myth engine) there were significant differences between Phoenix's engine and the original code.

Rampancy: Is Phoenix being cancelled because of problems with Phoenix, or because another project is more attractive?

Matt: It's cancelled because it wasn't up to par. It wasn't a question of ability - we had a design and we could have finished the game. But making the game consistently fun was a problem, and in the end we decided to wipe the slate clean and start anew. But it didn't hurt that there was this new idea for the team to jump on. So I guess the answer to this question is a little bit of both.

Rampancy: What is that other project, what is so interesting about it, and will it be out by Christmas 2004? Will it be targeted for Xbox 1 or Xbox 2? (Given that consoles tend to have life cycles of about 3 years, I'll assume that by then the original will be a bit long in the tooth).

Matt: I'd probably be executed if I divulged anything about the new project now. We're just a few weeks into development, so I can't speculate on release dates. The team is still using standard Xbox dev kits, just like the Halo 2 team.

Rampancy: Will the new project be XBL enabled?

Matt: It's too early for me to answer that.