Bungie explains Activision deal

I can't go on record and specifically list off what those platforms will be, or what order they may or may not arrive in, but certainly one of our biggest goals - and really we think about it as storytellers, as people who work in creative mediums - it's our desire to share our stories and our universe with the largest possible audience, and certainly we've had an amazing run on 360 and I'm sure we'll continue to do so, but there are bigger opportunities out there for us and we would love to be able to reach more fans than we have before and really bring our experience to them on the platforms and devices of their choosing.

So certainly that's something we're planning for and working towards in the future, so it's great that's one area Activision has a lot of experience in.

Well, I don't want to go that far either. We're very sensitive to... we have a lot of work to go on Halo: Reach, and that's certainly our main priority right now and our main focus. We've got to knock this game out of the park and we've got a lot of work to go although a lot of great headway's been made.

But I think it's safe to say that we definitely are building our next big action game universe. I think Bungie's roots are firmly ground in the action genre, I feel like it's one of the core strengths of the studio, and we'll be building on those pieces that have helped define and shape Bungie over the past two decades.

We've been working right now simply on more of a pre-production level, so things that are really platform-agnostic. There's a lot of early work that Jason and the team have been doing on establishing the world. Because the bulk of our team is working on Reach, so we won't be able to dive in headfirst into all the details and full production until after Reach is completed. But I think that's one of the great things that makes it less daunting, because Activision has a really good network of shared services and people that have expertise on various platforms, so it makes it less daunting for us that once we do start to tackle those discussions we won't be going in blind - we'll definitely have some people who have a lot of experience under their belt to help us make the right decisions.

There's a couple of reasons. For one, this discussion with Activision really started nine months ago but the term sheet was signed on March 31st and the long form was just completed this week, so the deal is now official, it's final, it's locked. And it's pretty hard to keep something like that under wraps.

And we also, really, to be truthful, want to be sensitive to Halo: Reach, and this wasn't something we wanted to make be a big deal at E3. We don't want to overshadow the project that we're currently working on, and we knew it was going to be big news, and now that it's official we decided to get it out there and for us the hope is the news hits and then we want to quickly return focus and get our heads down on Reach. We have our beta launching on Monday and then we have a really busy schedule for the rest of the year, so for all intents and purposes our day-to-day lives are not changing for quite a while, so it's business as usual for us.