Hey, I know we said there’d be no update this week, because of the holidays and all, but I can’t help myself sometimes.

There’s some info floating around the interwebs about ways to enter the Halo 3 multiplayer beta… we’re not able to comment on that just yet but we do know that Microsoft will be formally revealing some new details next week. The initial sweepstakes registration on halo3.com was just the first stage of participation in the beta program.

We can comment, however, on our plans to roll-out a small pre-beta program to ramp up our scale just prior to the true public beta next Spring. Bungie will be tapping active members of our worldwide community to help us transition from the ongoing internal alpha multiplayer testing. Our hopes are to call into service experienced and active players of Halo 2 on Xbox Live, along with people who spread Bungie love (in safe, hygienic ways) and foster our community. Unfortunately we won’t be able to include everyone in this but we are hoping for quite a few (think thousands) spots. Once all the specifics are finalized we’ll provide more details on Bungie.net.

Last night I was privileged enough to visit HBO’s Deadly Night Halo LAN/Beer/Pizza event, if only for a couple of hours. I drank soda, ate some mashed Jaffa Cakes (thanks Jillybean, now I know why the “orangey bit” is referred to as “smashing”) and discovered that Schooly D is from Texas. It took some wrangling to get him to confess, but confess he did. If none of what I just said makes one metric lick of sense, then fear not. KP was there, documenting the entire thing and he’ll bring you back a report next week. Hopefully with pics.

Didn’t play too much Halo 3 this week because I was eating Figgie pudding. At least I hope that’s what it was. Anyway, that’s all for now. Happy New Year from everyone at Bungie except Noguchi, and may 2007 bring you the most incredible stuff you ever hoped or dreamed for. Including, but not limited to Halo 3.