Halo Confirmed for Mac, PC

Microsoft and Bungie Studios were featured prominently in Steve Jobs' Macworld Expo keynote address this morning. As Inside Mac Games reported from the event, Ed Fries, vice-president of Microsoft Games Division, revealed that Microsoft and Apple plan to form a new company to publish Microsoft games for the Mac OS. The new company will be headed by Peter Tamte, who founded MacSoft (since acquired by GT Interactive) and enjoyed a tenure at Apple before joining Bungie as executive vice-president of publishing.

While few details of the agreement are known at this time, Fries mentioned Age of Empires II, Links LS 2002, and NFL Fever 2001 while discussing the publishers' plans. While Microsoft currently has no plans to make year 2002 sports games or any 2001 game beyond Links, the company's Mac products often use updated names compared to their PC counterparts. The Mac equivalent of MS Office 2000, for example, will be released this October as Office 2001.

One Microsoft game that had its Mac future reassured today is Halo. To dispel doubts that arose after the Microsoft acquisition, Bungie showed off the latest Halo trailer at the keynote and announced that the game will appear on the Macintosh. This announcement also makes it much more certain that the game will make it to the PC, but it has not yet been revealed whether the previously announced Xbox version will ship first.