San Jose Mercury News columnist Dean Takahashi has written a second book about Microsoft's foray into the console gaming business. Released as an eBook, The Xbox 360 Uncloaked: The Real Story Behind Microsoft's Next-Generation Video Game Console also offers some interesting perspectives on the development of Bungie's Halo franchise.

That the fate of the new console should be tied to Bungie's flagship game is certainly no shock; since 2001 Bungie's series of shooters have been system-sellers for the Xbox, and Halo 2 has had a stranglehold on the top spot in Microsoft' Xbox Live online gaming service since it was released in late 2004.

Takahashi's book claims that Bungie became caught in a struggle between the hardware and software sides of the Microsoft Games Division over how to best promote both the platform as a whole and individual games, and that eventually Hamilton Chu, Pete Parsons, as well as other Bungie staffers, and Ed Fries, who spearheaded the buyout of Bungie by Microsoft, were all casualties of it in one way or another.

The below text is a sort of "executive summary" of the book, including many the points where the stories of Bungie and Halo intersect with the business of Microsoft Games Studio and the division of Microsoft that makes the Xbox and the Xbox 360. Excerpts from Takahashi's book are reproduced here with permission of the author. All quotations and paraphrases of statements by personnel currently or formerly of Microsoft or Bungie, whether identified by name or not, are taken from the book; no one contacted for this article wished to comment for the record at the time of its publication.

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With some time to kill recently, I browsed through my movies folder and looked for a few small things to watch. I came across the Halo 2 announcement trailer and the Halo 2 Realtime Demo.

Having watched the latter, I was especially struck by some of the themes I explored when comparing Halo 2 and Half-Life 2, as well as some of the contrasts between Halo 2 and Halo 1 with regard to the use of cutscenes versus interactive portions of gameplay for the purposes of relating story.

Much was made of the fact that the realtime demo was just that: a portion of a level played out by Bungie staffers doing a live demonstration, bookended with two cutscenes. The opening cutscene shows a Pelican carrying Sergeant Johnson and the Master Chief down to New Mombasa and landing; in the analogous sequence in the game, that Pelican crashes. The cutscene ends when the Pelican lands and the Master Chief disembarks; the change in the screen's aspect ratio signals this change.

However, the non-combat interactivity doesn't stop there. The Master Chief passes medics assisting injured marines and overhears their comments, and observes as Cortana, through the Chief, interacts with a corporal presiding over the death of the lieutenant at the scene, who then directs the chief to the new officer in command, Sergeant Banks. Sergeant Banks greets you, and then we see him call in an airstrike on a nearby Covenant artillery piece that has Banks' men pinned down. As we watch, three Longswords swoop in overhead and take out the artillery.

All this occurs during normal gameplay. As with nearly all such sequences in Half-Life 2, the player could have wandered away and missed part or even all of it. Valve seemed unafraid of this possibility, as they included virtually no cutscenes in Half-Life 2 at all.