With the New Year right on the horizon, what better way to start it up then with a nice healthy rumor. With the completion of their record breaking title, Halo: Reach, all eyes have been on Bungie for one reason alone; what is their next title going to be? Bungie essentially made their name with the original Halo, Halo: Combat Evolved, and have gained a majority of their success from the Halo franchise.
As of 2005, there were 5 million copies of Halo: Combat Evolved sold in the United States. Halo 2, which is said to be the best in the multiplayer aspect of the franchise, sold 500,000 during the first day of sales according to Gamestop Inc. Setting an industry record for first day sales. Halo 3 sold 1.8 million copies within the first 8 hours. Setting yet another sales record. Bungie’s latest installment, Halo: Reach made an astounding $200 Million dollars in 24 hours.
With all that said, we’re brought back to the original question, what’s next for the studio that brought us the extremely lucrative (and fun) Halo franchise?
Well, it’s looking like they’re heading towards a trip down memory lane with a Marathon game. What’s Marathon? Marathon is the futuristic First Person Shooter that Bungie released back in 1994. Set in the year 2794, the player is nearly killed when Durandal (the ships Artificial Intelligence) tampers with the airlock on the Mirata (space shuttle). Immediately after, an alien ship comes by and destroys the Mirata with you character narrowly escaping inside of an escape pod. The player then lands on one of Marathon’s docking bays.
That game was made in 1994 and was played off of a floppy disc, which is basically ancient technology. Would you mind seeing a remade version of Bungie’s older game? Doesn’t seem like too bad of an idea. There are few clues leading to this conclusion, but all aren’t very farfetched at all. None of these are said to be official, just rumor and speculation. We’ll start it off with the latest break in Bungie’s future projects, Bungieaerospace.org.
Bungieaerospace.org is a site that just sort of appeared out of nowhere. If you look at the site today, you’ll see nothing more than a countdown (now at 4 days) at the word “Tru7h.” The 7 in “Tru7h” also acts as a link to Bungie.net. The image below is a screenshot from the websites domain on December 23rd. You’ll see a poem towards the top and it ends with two lines in what seems to be Latin.The Latin in the image “sic itur ad astra” translates to “So about to go to star” probably meaning about to travel to the stars. The second line “fatum iustum stultorum” means “Fate what is right fools.”
Upon further investigation, the websites coding also hints at more information. Specifically at during the last line of the coding.
</font> <p> </body><!--COde ErrOR: 931.461.60231.14.vt920, Please REBOOT to FiX...--> </html>
The part of the code that’s bolded “.vt920” was also used in old screenshots for Bungie’s old title, Marathon (terminal 0). The numbers are located in the lower right corner. The website is linked HERE.
With the Bungieaerospace.org being up, this website could very well be fan made. There is Bungieaerospace.com. This is officially from Bungie and links to Bungie.net as well. There’s no countdown or mysterious poem, but it’s the real thing. I’m not holding my breath for the .org domain site, but I’m not ruling it out completely either.The Bungie Aerospace story has been around for some time with next to no information released about it. The only bit of somewhat credible information has been from the infamous Tom Morello.
Tom Moreallo is the person who leaked some Halo: Reach images that were said to be fakes, yet resembled the games final product very closely. Several images have been leaked from him and anything with his name on it automatically gets insurmountable amounts of attention. There have been a few new images leaked from a "Not Tom Morello" that are said to be fake by Bungie's own, Luke Smith. The images below are the said leaks. They look like they're from a game in very early development and many have said they're just modified Halo: Reach and Halo 3: ODST skins.
There's several images from the same game shown above that are all suppose to be from the leaked Bungie project. You can find the rest on IGN's Forums HERE. Along with the images came a description of weapons and the style of gameplay. Along with the fact that the person was playing the game on the Playstation 3.
Playstation 3 and Bungie? Sounds ridiculous right? Actually, it's possible since Bungie signed, what they're calling a "10 year alliance" with Activision. Supposedly, there's talk about the company going multi-platform.
Rumors and speculation are some of the best resources we have and more often then not, they're true. We'll see what 2011 hold for Bungie as I'm sure we're all waiting for their new venture into the gaming industry.
