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In a move that signals a new chapter in the history of Bungie, developer of the iconic Halo video game franchise, on April 29, 2010 the company announced that an "exclusive 10-year publishing partnership" with Activision has been forged that will see their next big action game universe land on multiple platforms and gaming devices.   Under the agreement, Activision has obtained worldwide rights to publish and distribute all future Bungie games based on a brand new intellectual property.  Bungie will remain an independent developer and retains ownership over this new IP.

Bungie was founded in 1991 and later acquired by Microsoft in 2000 to develop the Halo franchise exclusively on Xbox platforms.  Microsoft Game Studios announced in 2007, just days after the launch of Halo 3, that they released Bungie from their stable of developers, paving the way for Bungie's creative and organizational independence.  It wasn't a complete split however, with Microsoft retaining a minority equity interest in Bungie, and continuing its long-standing publishing agreement for the Microsoft-owned Halo franchise.  Under the Microsoft banner, Bungie's Halo franchise has grown to a global entertainment phenomenon, having sold more than 25 million units worldwide and spawning multiple spin-offs including best-selling novels, original soundtracks and the recent collaborative anime project Halo Legends .

"Today, we’re poised to open a new chapter in Bungie’s history—one that begins with a partnership between Bungie and Activision and ends where we always knew it would, with World Domination," says Bungie's Community Content Writer Eric Osborne (aka Urk) on the company's official blog .  "Our Next Big Thing now has a concrete path, leading from our studio to the platforms of our choosing. The business formalities are behind us. Our Constitution remains unchanged. We are still Bungie, still independent, and now we are free to bring our stories to an ever bigger audience."

Thomas Tippl, COO of Activision Blizzard and Harold Ryan, President of Bungie announcing the partnership

In an interview with Kotaku mere hours after the announcement, Bungie's community director, Brian Jarrard, said their next project will be a "brand-new action game universe" that will not be revisiting anything from their past.  That immediately rules out games based on the company's popular Marathon and Myth trilogies, the two franchises Bungie is best known for in their early Macintosh days.

"With the scale and ambition of what we hope to accomplish with our next universe — how bold we want it to be and how much time we want people to spend in our universe, and the types of stories we want to tell — it is going to take our best and brightest minds of our studio to make this vision a reality. It is going to take everything we have to pull this off," Jarrard tells Kotaku.

In an age of heavy publisher control over distributed games, the agreement stands as a rare exception with Activision giving a lot of the decision-making power over to Bungie, including a good deal of creative control, ownership over the IP and even the ability to set the final price of the game.

Bungie's next game will be the Xbox 360 exclusive Halo: Reach , coming out this fall.  Building upon ten years of experience developing the Halo franchise, Bungie calls Halo: Reach the "the most ambitious game" they've ever made.  Access to the multiplayer beta is set to kick-off tomorrow and will run through to May 19.  To join the beta, gamers will need to use their Halo 3: ODST campaign disc.

While Bungie has extensive first-person shooter experience with their Marathon and Halo franchises, I hope to see the developer broaden their horizons with this new IP in partnership with Activision.  The mega publisher has a line-up already saturated with FPS's such as Singularity , Treyarch's upcoming Cold War-based Call of Duty game, and the inevitable Modern Warfare 3 .  It would be great to see Bungie get back to their real-time strategy roots, or venture into the third-person sandbox action genre.  The possibilities are wide open, and exciting to think about.