Rampancy

Chris Barylick at Macgamer managed to nab an interview with Bungie's Matt Soell at E3, and covered a rather wide range of topics. Thanks again to Louis Wu at HBO.

On Bungie doing another Myth or Oni game:

There's no plan to do another Myth game right now, but it might happen in the future if we got the rights back. I haven't played Myth 3 since a lot of people ran out, bought it and have had problems with it.

I don't know, they haven't really approached us about it. If they came to Bungie with another Myth or Oni game, at least in an advisory capacity, it could happen.

On another Marathon game:

I don't think we'd ever do something where we just took an old game and slapped it into a new engine, tell the same story again. It would be possible for us to do another Marathon game. Whether we're going to, I can't say.

On Bungie's silence regarding the Mac/PC port of Halo:

The lack of information, the radio silence that Bungie maintains, it doesn't lend itself to a lot of confidence. When it happens, people are going to be happy and surprised. We're really honestly working to keep our promise. It would be a lot easier to say fuck it, no Halo version for Mac or the PC, buy an Xbox.' We thought we were going to be able to say something substantial here at E3, but couldn't keep the legal dogs at bay, which we're clearing up. There should be an announcement soon.

The code is being ported from the Xbox to run on the Mac and PC and we'll see what needs to be done. Once the Xbox version was done, people went away for a while and came back, we're playing it to make sure it doesn't suck. Now we're figuring out how we do it and who does what, it's taken a long time and been a huge pain in the ass. The good news is that the preliminary stuff is taken care of and people are working with the code to get it working.

The emphasis is ours, but this seems to directly contradict what DiCesar said about development not being on the board-- in fact, it sounds as if code is being ported right now.

Patroclus' homage to Mystery Science Theatre, complete with appropriate Bungie references is now here at R.net in 2Mb and 10Mb sizes. Thanks for the heads-up to Louis Wu at HBO.

There's a reason why the practice of explaining how a football team could have won a game they lost-- after the fact-- is armchair or Monday morning quarterbacking.

That should be kept in mind when reading the Monday Morning CEO column at Red Mercury.

However, that doesn't mean there aren't a few salient points sneaking about.

The point of the MMC piece from May 20 entitled Xbox Economics seems to be that the Xbox isn't exactly a hit-- and that consoles that aren't a hit tend to end up being quite a bit less than just not a hit .

It also picks up one interesting technical point that gets glossed over a lot when comparing the approach of MS to the Xbox's design to the more traditional console approaches of Sony and Nintendo:

It appears that Microsoft is in a dangerous price war that it is losing. But what would happen if one of their competitors suddenly combined two of its major computer chips in to one chip, tripling the output of their manufacturing plant? That competitor's costs would fall dramatically, and they could drop the price of their console much faster and much lower than Microsoft could.

Sony has done exactly this with the Playstation 2. Two of their largest chips will now fit on to one chip. Sony invested $1 billion in their own chip fabrication facility. Now you know why. Microsoft, on the other hand, grabbed a bunch of off-the-shelf chips from a variety of vendors and shoved them together in an absolutely huge, expensive, heavy box that looks a lot like a PC and would probably maim a small child if it fell off the top of a TV. Even if Microsoft could combine the nVidia graphics chip with the Intel CPU, do you think nVidia and Intel would go for this? These chips are owned by different (competing) companies, and the chips are manufactured in different places. If this combination were even physically possible, it would never happen for obvious competitive business reasons that are completely out of Microsoft's hands. Microsoft's box is, and will continue to be, expensive to make, because they don't control the silicon. They will not catch up to Sony or Nintendo on manufacturing costs.

Interestingly enough, MS' approach to building the Xbox was very similar to that of IBM's towards producing their own PC: parts-bin innovation. They took off the shelf elements to put something together as quickly as they could to get in the game against Apple. And although they eventually ended up with a whole host of clone companies to compete against, today the Wintel architecture clearly owns most of the PC market. Which isn't to say MS would welcome Xbox clones... but the proprietary natures of Sony's and Nintendo's hardware designs does allow them more control over costs.

So, give the article a read, but with equal parts Xbox Kool Aid and salt.

Thanks to FunkDaddy who pointed out the article in the HBO forum, and to Ferrex who provided counterpoint.

Sometime in the future, we may all have our hands on the game that Bungie originally intended to make when they began work on Halo.

And no, we're not talking about the Mac/PC version (which, by the way, will still happen, as far as everyone knows).

No, we're talking about a version of Halo featuring online multiplayer for MS' Xbox Live gaming service that is slated to begin beta testing later this year.

Louis Wu at HBO pointed out an MS press release (posted at TeamXbox) and a GameSpot article that both mention this Halo Online project.

The release says:

As for 'Halo™' and the work the Bungie Studios team is doing, gamers can rest assured: The fate of humanity is in good hands... and online.

The GameSpot piece goes into more detail, indicating that we might finally get some of the things from the original Halo press release from 1999 at MacWorld: team-based cooperative play, for instance. GameSpot quoted Jason Jones as saying that it was now feasible to build the part of Halo that Bungie wanted to do.

There are no direct quotes, so what follows in that article may be speculation, but it certainly is tempting to hope it will become reality:

After Microsoft acquired Bungie in 2000, the game's development turned to focus on the single-player experience. However, back when the game was slated as a PC first-person shooter, Bungie had ambitious plans to develop cooperative team-based multiplayer for Halo. At this early stage, Halo's multiplayer was to feature combat between terran and Covenant forces on a massive scale, and players would be rewarded for taking specialized roles such as driving and flying vehicles for teammates. The Halo world itself was envisioned as an enormous world that would allow seamless transitions between environments.

GameSpot has more coverage of Xbox Live as well.