Bungie bids Halo farewell

It's not really my place to alleviate concerns about Activision. I think the partnerships we create are the ones that are the best for us. We're an independent developer, we're employee-owned and we're in a position to do something we hope that will be really well-received and be wonderful and tell a great story in a brand new universe. All that boring business stuff is not stuff we're really interested in talking about. We'll live and die on the quality of the games we make and that's what we're most concerned about.

It's definitely busy here. Everybody is guns blazing and working to the next thing. We're hitting some pretty significant milestones and just really excited to dig our teeth in and make a game. In some ways it's the same process, and in many ways, like all things in games development, it changes rapidly. So there's always new problems to solve, always new creative situations to shoot through, new team members, old team members - it's fun. It's always a challenge. It doesn't stay the same from one day to the next.

It's my job to pay attention to it, to make sure we respond to the right kinds of things and let other things that we don't normally touch just kind of sit there. Yeah, I see them, I know that they're out there. Speculation is usually generated when people are interested, so in that respect it's good. People want to know what we're doing and people are engaged. That's pretty cool. We're kind of going into a dark phase now. We're not going to make a whole lot of noise, we just want to allow people to build anticipation. And frankly we're really, really busy. So some of that stuff you just let fall by the wayside, and some of it you may want to address depending on the context and content.

It was just born out of… we did a press tour and people were like 'that's kind of an egalitarian viewpoint. You just want to help other developers publish their games because you like playing games?' That is in fact a really big part of what we're doing there. We're working with Hair Brained Schemes on its game Crimson that's going to ship in the summer. We don't have a date on it yet but it's an iPad game, it's a tonne of fun, everybody here at the studio is giving it some time on their breaks and having fun with it.

Really it's about forging really good partnerships with small mobile developers and seeing what comes out of that. For us it's partly about creating great games and it's partly about learning about those experiences. We've already said our next universe will be multiplatform, multiformat, so we're definitely interested in that area.