Bungie slams Game Boy Halo chatter

Bungie has moved to aggressively quash rumours that a Game Boy Advance remake of Halo is underway, despite absolute assurances from sectors of the gaming press. Speaking on its official site, Bungie said, "There is no Game Boy version of Halo planned, and none in production."

Bungie went on to explain the reasoning behind this: "It's very unlikely that such a version would ever happen for all the obvious reasons, and the less obvious reasons, that the ColecoVision talks fell apart and The Bandai Pippin version is taking up all our development bandwidth…"

However, the source of the claims, IGN Games, stands by its guns in what emerged as an interesting information showdown over the weekend. "We, of course, all can go back and forth...but I'm sticking to my guns on this. I've been told by multiple development sources that a Halo GBA project has at least been in the "looking into" stages since before Christmas. Anything can happen between now and then, of course, but don't expect it until 2005 if production moves forward," claimed one writer.

He continued, "I'm normally against publishing "rumours" as news stories, which is why this is the first I've ever reported it...this is something I've known about for MONTHS. And since I've seen this same rumour posted in two separate publications in the past few weeks, I thought I'd stick my neck out and confirm that, at least from what I know, that the at least rumours had a lot of strength to them (sic)."

Strange goings on indeed. It is fair to say that the games industry will happily move to discredit the gaming press to cover its tracks when things have gone awry, something that any decent gaming news site will have encountered more than once. It would seem that this is just another case of smoke and mirrors…