Bungie

Crimson: Steam Pirates, the first game to be published under the Bungie Aerospace banner -which is the Halo developer's way of giving a leg-up to independent studios - will be available as a free download for iPad from September 1. However, not everyone is pleased by the news. Andy Moore, one of the developers of the strategy game SteamBirds to which Harebrained Schemes' work bears a more than passing resemblance, considers on his blog whether he is entitled to be annoyed by his work being cloned. In the comments, he's since backtracked from his original claim that "Bungie is being a moral dick," but he raises some interesting questions about when cloning's hypothetical statute of limitations ought to expire.

The Halo developer has now been in business for 20 years, and has marked the occasion with the release of an hour-long documentary, O Brave New World. It charts the company's rise from relative obscurity to the Xbox's most prized asset, and also counts as a farewell of sorts to the Halo series as it moves onto its first project for new parent Activision. That project is codenamed Tiger, with co-founder Jason Jones saying: "One reason that Tiger is so intriguing to so many people is that it's reaching players in a way that we haven't before."

The Halo developer has revealed Aerospace, a partnership initiative which will see it support smaller developers using Bungie.net and its community. The first such partnership is with Seattle’s Harebrained Games, led by Jordan Weisman, the man behind the Halo 2 ARG, I Love Bees, as well as MechWarrior, Shadowrun and Crimson Skies. The studio’s iOS game, Crimson, will be released under the Bungie Aerospace banner this summer.

The Halo developer's 1994 sci-fi FPS is to be released on iPad, with the port being handled by lone independent developer Daniel Blezek. He has ported the game's original source code to iOS, and says his conversion runs at a steady 30 frames per second. “Digging into this code base to make the port happen and follow the iOS conventions was a huge effort,” he said. "It was months before the code even built without errors.”