Rampancy

Several stories around the web the last few days (XboxSolution, CNN have mentioned the resignation of Take Two's CEO, Jeffrey C. Lapin, and the subsequent revision of financial estimates for the second quarter and year-end results for 2004. Lapin had the CEO job for only one year and three months.

What does this have to do with Bungie? Well, for a while Take Two owned almost twenty percent of Bungie; when Microsoft bought the company, Take Two got the rights to the Myth and Oni franchises, as well as two licenses for the Halo engine in return for its shares.

Since being sold by Bungie, the Myth franchise saw the release and then abandonment of Myth 3 by Mumbo Jumbo, which was disbanded shortly after the game's disappointing release. The Oni franchise has remained dormant, and there's been no sight of any Halo engine games from Take Two.

Maxmidget in the HBO forum noticed a flurry of activity at IGN over Halo recently. After coverage of the new Bungie.net site, their mailbag feature included a fan letter criticizing Halo, which has now spawned a special Halo mailbag feature with fans of the game writing in to defend it.

Does a game with as many awards, accolades and sales as Halo need to be defended? Perhaps not, but that isn't stopping anyone.

Frank "Frankie" O'Connor and Brian "SketchFactor" Jarrard of Bungie have been interviewed by César "Cesar" A. Berardini at TeamXbox. Among the highlights: Frankie plays Halo on his Titanium Powerbook from the toilet. No kidding. I thought only I did that.

Thanks Louis Wu at HBO for the heads-up.

Xbox.com has an interesting article up titled Xbox Undercover: Who's watching the Xbox Live service?" which is well worth a few minutes to read just for itself, as it contains interesting information about how XBL is run and what an average day looks like.

Of course, it's made even more interesting for this tidbit:

11:30 p.m.

Shawn: Still rockin' the non-production networks. Some game developers are testing a game that begins with "H" and ends with "2".

Gee... wonder what that could be?