There have been a few stories on the Internet with tidbits about Phoenix, although the accuracy of all of them cannot be guaranteed.

On June 28, 2000 we posted this story about a GameSpot item referring to Bungie's Phoenix project. Since then it has been made part of their paid archives, so we can't see the entire article.

The part we quoted stated that:

There is at the moment no specific information on whether or not Phoenix will support multiplayer modes, and if so, whether over LAN, Internet, or both.

However, in the recent history of Bungie games only one has released without some multiplayer functionality (Oni) and this was not the original intent.

Also, Microsoft's Xbox Live service launches later this fall, so if Phoenix is released sometime after that it could, conceivably, be supported on it.

It is expected that Phoenix will be released for the Xbox. It is unknown whether it will be released for any other platforms.

Since it was first referred to as fantasy siege in an erroneous quote of Ed Fries, it has been assumed that Phoenix is a realtime strategy game with some kind of medieval theme, an inheritor of Bungie's Myth series (although not direct, as Take Two now owns those rights).

Frequently Asked Questions about Bungie's never to be released and unannounced but probably would have been realtime strategy game codenamed Phoenix.

NOTE: The Bungie project that was once known as Phoenix has been cancelled by Bungie, and the team that was working on it has begun developing a new game about which even less is known. There's a Q&A with Bungie's Matt Soell about the cancellation here at Rampancy.

Matt Soell of Bungie Studios said in a forum post at HBO that this idea has been talked about.

Halo 2 is expected to feature similar modes supported by Halo 1, as well as additional modes. For instance, Halo 1 could support 16 players on 4 Xboxes simultaneously over System Link (ethernet). It did not support Xbox Live. Halo 2 will fully support Xbox Live. Its per-game player limit may be as high as 64. It is expected that the limit of 4 Xboxes per System Link game will be removed, allowing more individual players to play on separate Xboxes, removing the necessity for split screen mode, although this mode is expected to still be available.