Bungie explains Activision deal

You know that's probably a much much bigger discussion than I can get in in the three minutes we have left, so I will give you a rain check and promise to you that when we can crack that seal open I would love to get Jason and Joe and a few of the guys and really let them kind of walk you through that creative process.

But I can tell you we've been talking about our next big thing for a long time now. Ever since we've divested from Microsoft it's been our intent to continue making these Halo games and make them as awesome as possible, but we've also had an eye towards the future and what would be next, so it's kind of like a snowball where it started out slow with people just starting to throw ideas around and over time it just picks up more and more momentum and gets bigger and bigger, and we've been hiring more people against it, and now suddenly we have the beginnings of a more formalised pre-production and the goal is that as soon as Reach is completed and out the door the majority of our team will be able to roll right into our new project.

Of course we'll still have some people who will be fully focused on supporting [Reach] after release and being there for our community, but right now things are moving really fast. We have a 180-person studio now and we need to be able to absorb the bulk of the team onto our new project and hit the ground running.

We talked about that a lot with the Activision folks, and I get the impression you're not going to see a lot more of that, because to hear them talk about it - and I think it's better to look at their perspective because I have a pretty insular view of these things - but there aren't that many developers out there that can demand and get that kind of deal. I think you can count them on one hand.

So we're really fortunate to be in that kind of position in that we have the ability to embark on our own path and control our own destiny, and as far as if there's going to be a big change, I don't think there is, because I don't think there's enough developers out there that have the track record to attract a deal like this.

It's certainly possible but it's not something that's specifically identified right now. That would be an incremental, secondary discussion that might come at a later date, but we have such grandiose plans for our next big chapter that it's going to take all of our best and brightest minds to work on it, so it's not going to be a scenario where we suddenly have three different teams working on three different projects.

Yeah, I would say probably never? [Laughs.]