Whats next for Bungie?

Everybody knows that Halo 3 is well underway at Microsofts Bungie unit. But theres more going on inside the secretive game developer than just that one blockbuster project. Jason Jones, the project lead on the Halo games, and Chris Butcher, the top programmer, are both working on a different game. They are on a small project that is exploring something new beyond Halo. These folks are the cream of the crop in terms of the key talent at Bungie. Without them, neither Halo nor Halo 2 would have happened. Jones took about a year off after the launch of Halo 2, traveling around the world. Now he's back and is trying to come up with something new.

On top of that, Bungie apparently has another team working on yet another game. The whereabouts of Pete Parsons, general manager of Bungie, arent known. He is no longer the general manager and he has left Microsoft. We dont know which new Bungie game he is associated with, but it should be interesting. I asked Peter Moore about a second team at Bungie way back at E3 in May, and Moore said, I dont know that Bungie has a second team. Microsoft has declined comment.

Halo 3, meanwhile, is well underway and just went through a script rewrite. The game is slated for 2007 still. Spong.com recently went out on a limb and talked about how Halo 3 will be the last game in the Halo series and that Microsoft is likely to announce a new non-Halo Bungie game at the X06 event in late September in Barcelona, Spain. Various tidbits suggest that Halo 3 brings the story to its close. That makes sense since others have told me that Jason Jones is not a sequel kind of guy before. I wrote in my latest book that Jones toyed with other games such as a castle siege game and another game that involved Minotaurs, a subject of an early Bungie game, but both were canceled. Jones wound up returning to help finish Halo 2 while it was in midstream. Butcher, meanwhile, was one of the technical heavyweights who offered a lot of feedback to the engineers on how to design the Xbox 360. He was one of the folks, for instance, who argued to double the amount of memory in the system to 512 megabytes.

And lastly, a new Halo novel is slated to come out this year. (This got posted on Digg first). Amazon.com lists two new novels coming by Eric Nylund. One is Halo: the Ghosts of Onyx, slated for release on Oct. 31. Another is Halo: The Ghosts of Coral, slated for release on April 3, 2007.