I've been playing the heck out of Freeverse's Marathon: Durandal on Xbox Live. As it's an "old school" shooter missing a lot of the technical features found in more modern games, I had always assumed that the majority of its players would be old-time Bungie fans like myself.

When I saw SniperStealth atop the single-player leaderboard with over thirty million points, I felt here must surely be an old Marathon hand who knows every twist and turn of each level without even glancing at the map.

That's not true, as it turns out. SniperStealth only had a chance to play the original briefly before diving into M:D on XBLA, but that can only be good news for Freeverse if more Bungie fans who haven't played Marathon check in to see where the roots of Halo came from.

SniperStealth was kind enough to spend a few moments to answer my questions about what drew him to this classic game.

Click "read more" from the front page for the transcript of Rampancy's interview with SniperStealth, the leading Marathon: Durandal campaign player.

GameSpot interviews Wideload's Scott Corley, formerly of Red Mercury and High Voltage Software, who is now heading up the Wideload Shorts department. Wideload Shorts is currently working on an Xbox Live Arcade game, said to be "nearing its final stages" with the goal of being released before the end of this year.

Gamasutra has a five page interview with Alex "The Man" Seropian at Wideload; not too much new or substantive there, but he does confirm that Hail to the Chimp uses the Unreal engine, and that the studio has grown to 20 or so full-time and that sum is divided into two teams.

Luke Smith has posted an interview with Freeverse's Bruce Morrison over at Bungie.net to explain how and why Marathon is coming to the Xbox and the role that the Bungie community played in it:

Gamasutra has prodded Wideload Games' Alex "The Man" Seropian into admitting that the company he founded has a second team working on an Xbox Live Arcade title. The author suggests this may be the object of the cryptic reference, "Coming Soon: Project: Hot Sauce and the Rainbow Space Car" that appears on the company's recently-revamped website.

In part due to information collected during the Halo 3 Multiplayer Beta, players can expect the release version of Halo 3's multiplayer game to be a better experience than Halo 2, says Tyson "Ferrex" Green, Bungie's multiplayer design lead. Toronto-based radio station 680 News has a text article on their website (thanks Louis Wu for the heads-up) with Green about the upcoming game.

GamePro interviews Bungie's Lars Bakken about the Halo 3 Beta.

PALGN has an article up giving their impressions of the Halo 3 Beta, by Alistair Macleod.

Here's a quick run-down on some sites with impressions of the Halo 3 Public Beta:

Alexander "The Man" Seropian, cofounder of Bungie and later Wideload Games, currently working on Hail to the Chimp to be published by Gamecock next year, gave an interview to Armchair Empire this week.

Game Informer gave Bungie ten questions and Bungie's own Brian "SketchFactor" Jarrard gave ten answers. A quick summary: "delta", "stay tuned", and "what demo?". For the questions, see the interview.

MTV is into all the things the hip kids do these days, including play videogames. MTV did a video interview with Microsoft's Phil Spencer about Halo, and MTV News has a piece up on Gamecock, the outfit that will be publishing Wideload's next game.

Wideload's Alex Seropian related a story about trying to find a publisher for the company's first game, Stubbs the Zombie:

Keeping a company light on its toes by keeping the core creative staff small and outsourcing the fiddly bits is how Wideload Games is approaching the problem of rising game development costs.

Alexander "The Man" Seropian (or should it be "The Chimp" from now on?) throws poop at GameSpot today about Wideload's upcoming party game for the Xbox 360 and Sony Playstation 3.

Is there going to be political satire? Yes, says Seropian. The Bush:Chimp comparisons are obviously unavoidable, but am I the only one who thinks the hippo looks like Steve Ballmer?

I'm way too uncool to even know what that means, but that's how Frankie described Halo 3 in an interview with Eurogamer.

On a more intelligible note, he also said:

Well, we haven't lost a single [new] weapon thus far, but we've improved a few. Our test process is simple. Play it, play it some more, take notes, make changes, play it more.