Halo 3

Robbie Bach says that Bill Gates' widely reported comment about Halo 3 launching against PlayStation 3 next spring was a philosophical one rather than a specific pledge.

Speaking in an interview with the IDG News Service this week, the head of Microsoft's entertainment and devices division said, "Halo is something we'll ship when it's ready".

Last May, Bill Gates said in an interview with Time magazine that the second wave of 360 titles would arrive in time to cause Sony problems. "It's perfect," he said. "The day Sony launches, and they walk right into Halo 3."

Bach argues that his boss was using Halo as an example. "Philosophically the point Bill was trying to make is that we’re not just going to ship and not have great stuff coming up," he told IDG.

Bach also commented further on the decision to offer the Xbox 360 hard disk as an optional extra, indicating that it may have been influenced by price sensitivity in parts of Europe.

Speaking ahead of X05, which takes place in Amsterdam today and tomorrow, Bach said of the decision not to include a hard disk as standard: "It's particularly important in Europe where parts of Europe are very price sensitive and the channels where games consoles are sold are predominantly mass merchants which again are very price sensitive... One size doesn't fit all."

we reported that Universal Studios and 20th Century Fox were both in negotiations with Microsoft to fund and distribute a movie based on the Redmond software company's Halo videogame series.

Negotiations appear to have succeeded, and the two companies will indeed share costs and revenues for the eventual science-fiction actioner. According to Studio Briefing, Universal and Fox will pay Microsoft $5 million plus a percentage of box office receipts to distribute the film, the former handling production and domestic release, and the latter distributing the film internationally.

In spite of the recent increase in game-based movies, film adaptations are increasingly seen as a risk for game companies and their very lucrative game franchises. Halo 2, for example, took in over $125 million in its first day of sales last year. Rather than trusting a Hollywood studio to develop – and possibly ruin – the movie, Microsoft has kept close control of the project, hiring 28 Days scribe Alex Garland to write the Halo screenplay

Microsoft is expected to time the premiere of Halo: The Movielord to coincide with the release of the next videogame in the series, Halo 3.

Expect the Halo movie to come out sometime in 2007.

A very sharp MegaGames reader, with a lot of free time on his hands, has pointed us in the direction of an official Microsoft page which gives away some information regarding the future of Halo. Considering the unparalleled sales success of Halo 2, you don't have to be a nuclear scientist to figure out that Microsoft will definitely mine for some more Halo gold.

Details of MS plans for Halo 3 however, have been scarce and many questions remain unanswered. When will development begin on the third game? Will the third installment appear only for XBox 2? The information provided does offer some hints about what we can expect from Halo 3.

Ironically the information regarding Halo 3 comes from MS CEO, Steve Ballmer, discussing how secure and leak proof, Microsoft's Information Rights Management for the Office system is. The comments were made on October 21, 2003 during the MS Office System 2003 launch. In order to demonstrate the security properties of the Office System, Ballmer proceeds to give an example We're working on the next version -- I hate to tell you this confidentially but I'll have to swear you to secrecy now -- we're working on the next version of Xbox right now and we're working on Halo 2 and Halo 3, the two newest versions of the game.

Now, the plan for those things are super, super secret, top secret type stuff. I mean, they really are, in fact, because if you take a look at our competition with Sony it's a big chess game -- who's going to do what. And the team said, 'Look, we want to send out the documents about this, but we really only want them to go to very few people.' They sent those documents and the e-mail around that protected with Information Rights Management. I got the document. I couldn't print it. I was not allowed. They didn't give me permission to print it. I couldn't Print Screen it. They didn't want to give me permission to do that. I couldn't forward it and when I replied to it, it stripped everything out of the original e-mail so that there was not a trace, not a place for leakage in the system.

What the above comments tell us, bearing in mind they were made over a year ago, is that Halo 3 is already over a year in its development and was, in fact, being developed almost in parallel to Halo 2. The mention of the next XBox and the timing on Halo 3's development suggest that the game will most likely be a launch partner for XBox Next, just like its granddaddy was for XBox

All these are things we could, more or less, guess I hear you say. True but it's always nice to hear it from official lips, they don't come any more official than Steve Ballmer, but it is also interesting to find out that MS was developing Halo 2 and 3 in parallel. The other re-assuring aspect is that Microsoft may have finally created a full-proof Information Rights Management system which however, is not fool-proof.