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RTS Halo Mod Stopped by Microsoft

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the harshing-your-groove dept.

Headcase88 writes "Microsoft has officially asked the creators of Halogen to stop development at once. Halogen was an RTS mod being developed by Halo fans for the past three years. From the website: ' I was going to write a big sappy letter here, but what's the point. So..that's it then, I guess. The forums, site, and Moddb profile will all be shut down within the week. I can't say it hasn't been fun. It's a shame it has to end like this, but I suppose that's how it goes. Thanks, guys, for all the time you've spent supporting us. It's been a pleasure. We hate this as much as you do.' "

8 of 182 comments (clear)

  1. oh the irony by cortana · · Score: 3, Informative

    Halo was originally going to be an RTS, back when its working title was Armor, I think. Then it became a third person shooter, then MS bought Bungie and fucked everything up.

    1. Re:oh the irony by warbinger · · Score: 2, Informative

      Uh. MS didn't make it. Bungie did. Bungie in fact has it as a FPS WAY before MS bought them in 2000/2001. They showed it off in 1999 in fact at, the quite ironic place, MacWorld ;)

    2. Re:oh the irony by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

      bzzzt...

      Hate to burst your bubble, but LONG before M$ assimilated Bungie, Bungie demo'ed Halo running on a Mac at MacWorld SF. (The year escapes me, but go google it.)

      It was, apparently, ALWAYS a FPS (remember they did Marathon series too...) and was SUPPOSED to have been coming out for the mac right around the time that they were absorbed by M$, presumably with a Windows version at some later time. The demo shown at MacWorld looked and played EXACTLY like what was released when M$ hijacked it to the XBOX.

      I'd hazard that the only reason that M$ assimilated Bungie was that they needed some decent games to attempt to support the XBOX, which they did by hijacking just about every PC game in sight that looked halfway decent and halfway workable on a more limited PC, which is all the XBOX really was overall. M$ continues to do this to this day, with predictable results wrt GUI, resource utilization, etc. when said games are then released for the PC... i.e. they suffer horribly.

  2. Re:Too bad... by Schraegstrichpunkt · · Score: 4, Informative

    I was thinking the same thing about id and Quake.

    --
    http://outcampaign.org/
  3. Re:Too bad... by Das+Modell · · Score: 2, Informative

    But it's id's game and engine. I think Halogen is different because it's such an independent project, and not done with either of the Halo engines (if such a thing was possible). There was a Quake 2/3 mod (I forget which) called Generations which took characters and other elements from Wolf3D, Doom and Quake (and Q2, if it was a Q3 mod). Activision shut it down, but not id. So, I think if you stick to the game you're modding for or make something original, it's all legal. A port of Duke3D to Source was recently axed as well.

    Someone once claimed that if copyright holders don't enforce their copyrights, they'll lose them. This would explain why they want to shut down projects like Halogen, but I don't know if it's true. Sounds a little dubious.

  4. Re:Too bad... by spauldo · · Score: 4, Informative

    Someone once claimed that if copyright holders don't enforce their copyrights, they'll lose them.

    That's trademarks. Copyright doesn't require enforcement - everyone could use your works and then you could sue Joe Bob 'cause you think he's ugly. As long as he doesn't have explicit permission to your works, you're in the right.

    I put it down to lawyers being lawyers, and businesses being myopic in general. I'm sure they have their reasons, and I'm sure they're silly, but they take it seriously.

    --
    Those who can't do, teach. Those who can't teach either, do tech support.
  5. Re:Too bad... by grumbel · · Score: 5, Informative
    I was thinking the same thing about id and Quake.

    There is however a big difference: They are modding Command&Conquer and not Halo.

    C&C is EAs property, not Microsofts. So if this mod would have become successfull, it would mean more C&C copies sold and EA makes more money, not exactly in the interest of Microsoft, since they get zero out of it.

  6. Foxed. by unsigned+integer · · Score: 2, Informative

    Haven't you people learned? As long as some company owns the rights / copyrights / whateverrights to something that could conceivably make them a friggen' ***DIME*** - maybe not now, maybe not in 10 years, but at some distant point in the future, most companies CAN and WILL "protect" their intellectual property.

    If you're going to make a mod based on other people's junk, you better be prepared to go underground, or release it from some country that doesn't give a frack about WIPO - and then hope you never visit a country that participates in WIPO, because you will be blackbagged and locked up just because you dared pay homage to something you really took an interest in.

    *Subject is in reference to the Aliens: Total Conversion Doom mod that was shutdown by Fox Studios, as one of the first corporate shutdowns of a fan's work that I remember in the game scene.