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.