Ok, you have to be kidding me. Supposedly this is nothing more than an outlandishly freak coincidence, but according to the developer blog of Ensemble's Bruce Shelley, the internal codename used for the Halo Wars project is Phoenix-- the same codename used for a scuttled project at Bungie a few years ago that was rumored to be a strategy game of some kind, perhaps a fantasy game in the vein of Myth.

Shelley's entry doesn't give a lot of information about the game, but it does tell us who at Ensemble is working on it so far:

The Halo Wars team is the fastest growing at ES right now. Much of The WarChiefs team is rolling over to it and many of our new employees are also joining. The team is being led by veteran ES producer Chris Rippy and Lead Programmer Angelo Laudon. Both have been with ES from the start, nearly 12 years ago. Angelo was Lead Programmer on Age I and Age II. The Art Lead is Mathew Goldman, an industry veteran with many titles to his credit from years at Bioware. Lead Designer is Graeme Devine, another industry veteran with 20+ years experience. We think the project is in great hands.

The name Graeme Devine at least should be familiar to those fans perhaps new to the RTS genre but familiar with first-person shooters, as he worked with Id Software on Quake 3 and Doom 3.

In addition to the official HaloWars.com site and its forum, Halo Wars fansites are starting to sprout up. We saw the first of them linked from HBO: Halo Wars Central, which is currently running an art contest.

We've added a Halo Wars section to our database of links to other sites.

The buzz has died down a bit, but there are still a few sites catching up with the X06 Halo Wars bombshell. The latest is the BBC's site, which quoted Bungie's Brian "SketchFactor" Jarrard as well as HBO's own fansite editor, Claude "Louis Wu" Errera.

As for why a Halo RTS by Ensemble, Sketch put it nicely:

"Halo started as an RTS. Would the Bungie team love to do one themselves? Possibly.

"We are not focused on that. We've got a lot of work to do on Halo 3 and a trilogy to finish."

As for Wu, he was cautiously optimistic. Or optimistically cautious, depending:

"The entire team has been working on Halo games since 1998 and they are probably tired of it. But there are still stories to tell."

I suppose if one works on Halo games long enough, Pimps at Sea starts to look like a really good idea.

Indie in the Halo Wars forum pointed out some listings from the jobs page at Ensemble Studios. What he found particularly interesting were two items for MMO environmental and concept artists; what I find interesting are the console programmer and Xbox Live developer positions.

Ensemble hasn't really said a word yet about the features of Halo Wars, but it seems logical to conclude they'd at least be trying for multiplayer on Xbox Live. If not... what's the point, really?

To cope with all the new things we're tracking now, we've made some additions to the site. There is now a Halo Wars image gallery and a mirror of the QuickTime version of the Halo Wars trailer; this is a mirror of the same file provided at HBO and re-encoded by Louis Wu.

The image gallery has the five official images from the HaloWars.com website, as well as a series of 17 screen captures from the QuickTime trailer.

There are also keyword tags for Ensemble Studios, for Halo Wars, for Wingnut Interactive and for their upcoming series of Halo games, which for the moment we are codenaming BLAM because no title has been announced.

The Features menu in the left sidebar has a new widget for Ensemble, and this is where the Halo Wars content will live. If you've got javascript enabled, each of the hierarchical menus with a triangle sign can be open or closed without reloading the page by clicking the triangle.

From Ensemble Studios' own web page is this announcement for Halo Wars, which may assuage some of those already screaming that the meagre amount shown in the trailer contradicts known canon:

Breaking News - Ensemble Studios is bringing real-time-strategy to the Xbox 360 and to the Halo universe. Designed exclusively for the Xbox 360, Halo Wars allows you to take charge of the human UNSC armies and see the Halo universe from a totally new perspective.

Halo Wars is set during the UNSC's first deadly encounters with the Covenant, allowing players to lead the crew of the UNSC's "Spirit of Fire" from initial skirmishes to an all out war against the evil Covenant.

It's been pointed out that the very first Covenant-Human encounter was at Harvest, when no Spartans were present. However, I certainly think there are enough gaps in the record of the Human-Covenant war as presented in the novels to place a ground battle on a human colony world with Forerunner artifacts the Covenant want access to, where Spartans are in play and the Covenant are not yet glassing all Human worlds as a matter of policy, or are perhaps avoiding glassing one in particular for specific reasons.

Everybody calm down.