THIS IS MADNESS: Bungie ties the knot....

Folks. I just woke up from a horrid nightmare about chimps, plumbers and a petting zoo. And if anyone asks, the chimp was petting the plumber on the hat. But a recent article about Bungie leaves me no choice but to declare this

THIS IS MADNESS!

And no, there's no Sparta around here.

We all know Bungie has worked with Microsoft on the Halo franchise since it released back in 2001. After the completion of Halo 3, it was announced that Bungie would go its separate ways with Microsoft, but not before its final Halo games(Halo 3: ODST and Halo Reach) were released.

Recently at the Bungie website, something caused me to cry, and a million fanboys to rage. Bungie has recently signed a 10 year deal with Call of Duty IP owners Activision.

Bungie, the developer of blockbuster game franchises including Halo, Myth and Marathon, and Activision, a wholly owned subsidiary of Activision Blizzard, the #1 online games publisher (Nasdaq: ATVI), announced today that they have entered into an exclusive 10-year partnership to bring Bungie’s next big action game universe to market. Under the terms of the agreement, Activision will have exclusive, worldwide rights to publish and distribute all future Bungie games based on the new intellectual property on multiple platforms and devices. Bungie remains an independent company and will continue to own their intellectual property. Additional terms of the agreement were not disclosed.

3 years after Bungie breaks off from one evil empire, it teams up with yet another evil empire. And yet we happen to have been heckling Activision over losing Infinite Ward's best staff members. We never saw that coming from a mile away.

So why Activision? Why not someone like SEGA, SquareEnix, Capcom, err Warner Bros Interactive?

“We chose to partner with Activision on our next IP because of their global reach, multi-platform experience and marketing expertise,” said Harold Ryan, President of Bungie. “From working together over the past nine months on this agreement, it is clear that Activision supports our commitment to giving our fans the best possible gaming experiences.”
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Next thing you'll know, they'll be making the next Call of Duty game called "Call of Duty: Combat Evolved."*SHOT*

But we should all be worried about Activision owning Bungie even if the latter is still an independent company and Activision is only a publisher.

Works Cited: Bungie's website
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