Bungie Weekly Update
Posted by
KPaul
at
7/21/2006 6:58 PM PDT
Frankie's out of the office today, partying it up with Sketchfactor, the rest of the community team and a bunch of Bungie artists down in San Diego at the Comicon. Sketch, ever vigilant, posted a bit of news from San Diego this morning keeping Bungie fans apprised of the situation. Since I know that half of you are far too busy to be bothered with clicking links, I'll reproduce the important parts here:
Friday HGN Signing Schedule
11:00 - 12:00 @ Marvel Booth (#4315)
1:00 - 2:00 @ Diamond Booth (#2401)
3:00 - 4:00 @ Marvel Booth
Halo Panel
5:00 - 6:00 in Room 6A Come talk with a variety of artists and writers along with several Bungie folks. As a special bonus, Frankie is on hand to give out some free t-shirts.
Saturday HGN Signing Schedule
11:00 - 12:00 @ Diamond Booth
3:30 - 4:30 @ Marvel Booth
3:00 - 4:00 @ JoyRIde Booth
Saturday night is the huge Cosplay Masquerade spectacular. We're hoping to see some great Halo costumes this year! Frankie will be on hand to judge and award prizes to hardcore Halo fans.
Sunday HGN Signing Schedule
11:00 - 12:00 @ JoyRide Booth
Reports are starting coming in from folks around the Bungie community of Bungie sightings at the event. They will be hanging around various booths signing books, games and if all goes according to Frankie's plan, bewbs. As Sketch mentioned, they'll be handing out swag, ninja-style, on Saturday night to some lucky cosplayers. So go have a good time and post all about it on the forums like Tex did.
The Halo Graphic Novel is officially out now, with an MSRP of 24.99 but as has been mentioned previously, if you look hard enough you can find it selling for less both online and at a local retailer. You can find it at a variety of places: comic book stores, game retailers and regular book stores, I'm sure you've got at least one of these near you. It's 128 pages of new, meaty story and some really great artwork. It should appeal to everyone, you don't have to be a hardcore Halo story fiend to know what's going down in the stories and the artwork can certainly be appreciated by anyone. If you don't already have it, you really ought to pick it up, it's well worth it.
Thus far, HGN sales have been solid. On Amazon, the graphic novel has maintained the top spot in the Comics and Graphic Novels category and a spot in the overall top 75 since its release. As of right now, it's at #70 and currently beating out such notables as the upcoming Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, The Da Vinci Code, and The Bible. Furthermore, it absolutely creamed the novelization of the movie Men in Black II, by about 1,882,558 spots.
Bungie has progressed smoothly in the absence of the community team. The contractor pit has never been emptier. At the moment it's just the webtester and I in the pit as we've lost a few guys recently. Shishka, as you all know, has headed to Texas to work with Max Hoberman, the lesser-known Josh has been taken into the fold as a permanent employee and Ninja 0n Fire has gone to Hawaii to spend some quality time with the sun. Virtually unsupervised for the three days, I began construction of a mighty fortress of Xboxen, from which I planned to poke passersby with a stick. However, in a classic example of Engineering Disasters, I made no plans to Noguchi-proof the fortress. Sure enough, Noguchi came by on Thursday morning and removed a load-bearing Xbox, causing irreparable structural damage. My empire in ruins, he sadistically yelled, "JENGA!" and shuffled off.
We expect things to get much busier around here in the near future, however. The studio is really ramping up for Halo 3 as you may have guessed from the amount of job postings over the past six months. We're starting to see even more new hires begin to trickle in now, as there are a bunch of new artists upstairs. Some of them are even familiar faces to the community... more information on that after they get settled in.
What all of this has meant for the office is that there's been a massive reorganization. Unlike other companies, when we reorganize, it doesn't mean that we lay off 20% of our employees and kick their dogs. We actually reorganized all of the desks in the office to improve the communication between teams and so we could place people in an intuitive fashion. The floor plan now looks something like a honeycomb with a large walkway through the middle leading to the stairs and the kitchen area.
Speaking of kitchen area, this morning Alta's new assistant and the newest member of the Bungie Monarchy sent out an edict declaring today official day of the barbecue. Bungie employees were invited to relax behind the building and bring whatever they wanted to cook. Alta manned the grill and supplied a steady stream of hamburgers and hot dogs to the Bungie crew. There were chips, drinks and many a salad available to compliment the grilled fare. Several Grizzled Ancients, with their more refined palettes, were seen heading to the grill with some expertly seasoned steaks. It was a surreal experience; we definitely never had any cookouts at any of my other jobs.
Sorry about the short update, but it really has been a relatively quiet week. I'm sorry if you expected some Halo 3 information, but there's not really much I can bring you in the way of that. I will, however, confirm that the Assault Rifle fires projectiles. At the moment, at least. We might just end up turning it into a melee-only weapon.
That was a joke.
