Rampancy

Ok, definitely put this one in the Crack Pipe category. But recently a story ran on MacCentral that Contraband Entertainment had announced a new secret project in development for the Macintosh platform that they dubbed Heroin 4 U .

Contraband Entertainment, one might recall, is a company headed by Bill Burger Heineman and features other former Mumbo Jumbo developers. Several of those returned to Contraband after Myth 3's release and the subsequent closure of MJ. Contraband is doing development for a lot of different platforms, including Windows, the GBA and the PlayStation 2. They've also ported first person games to the Mac before (Hexen, Hexen II). They also list the Xbox among the platforms they can develop for, although there are currently no Xbox platform titles on their project schedule.

Is it possible this secret project is the Mac port of Halo?

One might assume that the Windows port could be more easily done in-house, given the Xbox's wintel heritage. Doing so might upset Bungie's other development efforts minimally.

Well, to be honest, there's no information to confirm or deny it; it's just a raw speculation. But giving the job to an outfit like Contraband would, in some vague sense, keep the job in the Bungie extended family, while freeing up Bungie proper to work on other projects. And in the vacuum created by the lack of official information, this story sneaks right in there like a whiff of Mary Jane from underneath the boys' room door. Stay tuned, if for nothing else but the hangover.

And now, for a few moments, we venture into the breach that straddles the realm of the official announcement and the territory of the unfounded rumor.

Louis Wu at HBO is reporting the rather specious claim forwarded to HBO by Greg that a site named GamePlay will take your preorder for Halo 2 right now-- despite their admission that there is no pricing information for the title. They've set their price at a shade under $45 pounds sterling-- that's about 70 or so Euros, or, for you Yanks out there, about $66.50. (Warning, this includes UK sales tax). They claim this should go down.

The UK retailer is claiming that Halo 2 was just officially announced at this year's E3.

But that seems like a bit of a stretch-- Bungie certainly never mentioned anything about Halo 2, nor did they show anything. But statements by Microsoft PR talked about an online enabled Halo title, and Bungie reps have repeatedly denied the existance of any Halo 1.5 title that would be online enabled.

That leaves any reasonable thinking person to conclude that:

1) There will not be an online-enabled version of Halo 1
2) There will be an online-enabled Halo game

This pretty much leaves open the only possible conclusion that:

3) There will be a sequel (or prequel) to Halo, for argument's sake called Halo 2 , that will have online play via Microsoft's Xbox Live service (as MS announced).

Now, Louis is warning us that Halo 2, as such, has not officially been announced-- but this seems a bit like splitting hairs. True, no positive statements regarding a Halo sequel have been made by Bungie personnel themselves. They've only told us what they won't be doing. But if we keep making these kinds of disctinctions we may reach a point where it's impossible to know anything about what Bungie is doing because of conflicts between statements made by Bungie and MS-- and to completely discount statements made by MS representatives really isn't a viable long-term strategy, given that at the moment they're the only one making statements about products and services that fall outside the immediate scope of what Bungie is doing-- things like Xbox Live, which Bungie games will most certainly support but which Bungie probably doesn't have authority or permission to comment on directly.

Matt dropped into the HBO forum to say that some Bungie Store preorders of the Halo Soundtrack had shipped as early as last Friday. So get your orders in!

In addition, Brian Blackstar Josselyn pointed out that the track listings are up at Tower Records' website, right under where it says track list not available. Somebody better warn Marty, though, because they list the composer as some clown named Martin O'Donnell... :)

Gamespot is running a poll on the most-missed E3 no-show, and Halo is an option-- in two flavors, even. Thanks to Louis Wu at HBO for the heads-up.