Kraken gets to go down in infamy as the reader who alerted us to the official news. In an interview with Jason Jones at the Daily Radar, it is confirmed: Bungie is being bought by Microsoft. Jones claims that Microsoft will still be allowing Bungie a certain degree of autonomy, including the choices of platforms to develop on.
From the article:
Steve Campbell of bungie.org pointed out this Daily Radar article to us:
Microsoft to Buy Bungie Software. I've gotta run off now and finish some articles by Monday that show that, no matter what happens, I knew it was gonna turn out that way all along.
Yes, as pointed out by rojay on our forum, Something Awful has come out with a second article on Halo, even more informative than their first.
Yet more info from halo.bungie.org! ZeroRage has postes on their forum giving a brief quote from NextGen concerning the new game Bungie was supposed to reveal behind closed doors at E3:
Happy seventh day! I just wanted to make a quick post to remind you about the upcoming Bungie Day. It will, according to Bungie.net's calendar, begin at 0707 on the seventh day of the seventh month - one month from now. Will Bungie do anything special to celebrate? Perhaps release a certain file or two for download? We'll have to see!
That's right! The Myth II b.net server has, as of this morning, been fully reset, allegedly in celebration of Mordia's birthday. Not just three games, all of the games, which means everyone is starting out with a clean slate. The mood is surprisingly positive... doubtless due to that fact that an emp is now 70 points, not 400.
Nevertheless, some people are a bit irate. There are 24 permutations of OMFG , and I think I've seen 19 of them now... need to go back and finish my collection. No shortage of games to be had tonight, that's for sure.
Kudos to Michael Ash for finding this one. I'll let him tell it in his own words (links added):
The general gaming site Gamers.Com has made a listing of the various companies attending E32K. Here's what they had to say about Bungie's booth: