Brannon Boren, of Boren's Syndrome fame, laments on his blog that the Wikipedia entry on Bungie Studios casts doubt on the existence of the Halo Bible.
Such a shame.
Normally the very entertaining Halo Story Page is rather like the equivalent of the Bungie fan community putting on funny costumes, lounging in easy chairs and sipping snifters of brandy while contemplating the treachery of Cortana, the inscrutableness of Gravemind and the machismo of Keyes family officers of both genders.
Wait, it's not the equivalent of that, it's exactly that.
However, today they've got something a bit better than that. Yes, hard to believe, but they do.
Joe Staten, along with Frankie and Robert McLees, at the request of mnemesis and Finn, granted the HSP an interview that contains some silliness, some pretty solid information, and some heavy hints about the Halo Story.
Let's sift through some particularly salacious morsels and read between the lines, shall we?
Click "read more" from the front page for the entire article.
Robert McLees said this image is worth a thousand words about the Covenant-Flood relationship.
The latest Bungie Spotlight is on former community member, current Bungie staffer Cunbelin, and his contributions to Halo 3:
Well My most recent item was to remake the classic human crate, better, faster, stronger! Well better at least. I've got a long list of those kinds of items both to be brought up to the Halo 3 standards and new ones to be created. I'd go into specifics but things shift almost daily in priority so it's hard to say what else I'll be working on.
If you need any more proof that what goes around, comes around-- usually to end up smacking you in the face when you turn around-- read this story at Joystiq alleging that not making Halo 4 would be stupid. I saw the story linked at HBO.
Spong says its sources at Microsoft indicate that a new, non-Halo Bungie game will be announced at X06 very soon:
Gravemind is not an easy character to figure out.
From his initial appearance on the scene, as the rumored "big plant thingy" players who downloaded the leaked French copies of Halo 2 reported seeing, to his cliffhanger-inducing interrogation of Cortana, not much was revealed about him.
Some fans can even be forgiven for questioning whether Gravemind is, in fact, related to the Flood at all. Halo 2's cutscenes only strongly suggest this, without actually stating it. The Art of Halo here rescues us, referring to Gravemind as the "Flood hive mind".
What exactly does that imply? What does Gravemind want? Given that all these events have apparently played out in the past, with the result that the Halo system was used and all life eradicated, but with the Flood preserved dormant for the cycle to start all over again thousands of years later, what other outcome can be hoped for?
Click "read more" below from the front page for the entire article.
[image:10245 left hspace=5 vspace=5 border=0] Bungie gave the community a gift of a seven minute documentary about the making of a two minute trailer for Halo 3, and the repayment they get? Gawkers looking over their shoulders, pointing at the screens being worked on by Bungie employees and proclaiming one or more "new species".
Keep in mind, this is the same Bungie that wouldn't even admit the game existed until a few weeks ago, even though it'd been under development for months. This is the same Bungie that kept the existence of the Flood a secret until the launch of Halo. This is the same Bungie that revealed nothing about the Flood being in Halo 2 until a French version of the game leaked, even though everybody already knew the Flood were probably in the game. The same Bungie that said everything was done but the cardboard boxes while they frantically re-tweaked Marathon levels. The same Bungie where Frankie did the majority of a studio tour of Bungie from the adjacent alley rather than have to check and make sure that the camera didn't accidentally give away the identity of the project Bungie was working on-- Halo 3-- even though the vast majority of the civilized world that even cared what Bungie was working on already thought it was Halo 3 anyway.
And people now think that not a mere glance, but a leisurely look over the screen of a Bungie employee showing characters on the screen is some kind of a magnificent revelation.
For the complete article click "read more" below.
This image from the documentary describing the process of creating the Halo 3 Announcement Trailer sparked much speculation: are these familiar species in new costumes, or entirely new species? The former seems more likely but some fans cling to the latter.
With apologies to Gilbert, Sullivan, and HunterX11 who started it.
We are the very model of a modern Halo IRC,
We've information Forerunner, Covenant and UNSC,
We know the prophet hierarchs and quote the drama ILB,
Play Marathon and Halo, too, sometimes even on XBC.
We're very well acquainted, too, with ICQ and IMDB,
About rampant speculation extremely skeptical are we,
With many useless facts about the status of the great journey.
A power loss at Bungie didn't stop Frankie from doing a Weekly Update-- although it did end up necessitating an ASCII Mister Chief.
This week's update is more about Halo 2 playlists and music than about Halo 3 though, as it has some notes about the next PLAY! concert in Philadelphia as well as the major matchmaking playlist changes that are coming up.
Well, as fans of the Webcam can appreciate, the power went out in our building about an hour ago, so I am typing this from the basement of a Kirkland abattoir. And that, ladies and gentlemen is why it's short and lacking any real art. I lost an entire day's work. Sorry. I don't have access to our servers. So the Bungie guys and gals took the afternoon off and headed to the local Tiki bar.
This week's Halo 3 Weekly Update by Frankie has more about Halo 2 than Halo 3, but that's no reason not to read it. At least, not a good reason. There's good news and bad news. The good news is, Halo 2 for Vista won't require DirectX 10. The bad news is, the Clan playlist is going away due to underutilization.
E3 brought up a lot of confusion about Halo 2 for Windows Vista, which is hardly surprising. We'd been working on fixed platforms (Xbox, Xbox 360) for so long, that we'd almost forgotten the vagaries and complications of discussing a PC product. I guess that's going to be the case for a while! Two games to update you on!