Chronique:BWU 17/02/2006

Posted by Frankie at 2/17/2006 3:54 PM PST

A video special this week! The long promised tour of the new Bungie office facility. Set your internets to Broadband for this very large, very pointless video spectacular. And by spectacular, we mean dumb.

This week's update is special. In fact, it's soooo special that it has to wear a helmet and ride a short bus to school. It's the long-awaited, phantasmagorical, scrum-diddly-umptious video tour of the new Bungie Studios.

Thanks to the elite video and directing skills of our very own auteur, Brian "Sketch" Jarrard (although he points out that he's a noob at this, and the quality may not reach the standards of other Bungie efforts), and the sweet new video suite we got for Bungie.net, we're finally able to bring you the ultimate tour de force, in the form of a tour de farce.

The new office is a really fun space. It's full of toys, practical features and an environment conducive to making excellent games. There's a lot of office area that we can't show you – including really cool things like storyboards, level designs, logos, graphics and audio stuff. TVs and monitors in this place are often blaring evocative sounds as well as images.

We spent the better part of a day scrubbing the video of anything too revelatory. If you see something on a screen that you think looks like a clue, we've seen it too, and for whatever reason, decided it wasn't letting any cats out of bags. When you DO decide you've spotted something, as you invariably will, remember we are the home of Halo 1, Halo 2, Halo 2 for Windows Vista, and that Guitar Hero setup is for fun, not for research. Or is it!!!?

Anyhoo, every word, thought, image and object has been vetted enough so that even if you come to a conclusion, it's probably wrong. That's not to say the video is boring. You might not like it, but boring it ain't. SO! INSTRUCTIONS TIME KIDS! This is a QuickTime movie, so make sure you got yourself some recent version of QuickTime . Now right click the image below and choose "SAVE TARGET AS" because this file is large, and it will smash your machine if you try to stream it.

For those without access to the magic of QuickTime , here's a snippet we just couldn't fit into a video tour. We just got done spending about $30k on color calibration. That means artist monitor calibration, a 15k reference monitor and lots of software and stick-on screen dongles. Why? Because there are at least four or five TV technologies to think about, not to mention competing TV broadcast standards (LCD, CRT, Plasma, VGA CRT, Pal, Secam, NTSC, Pal-B and more.) so although we realize that everyone's TV setup is going to be different, we want to make sure that our default(s) are as close to the "middle" as possible.

NOTE: the video's true purpose is to simply show you our new space, let you see the office and meet a few of its denizens. What this is NOT is a preview of our next game, so if you post a -blam!-y comment about that, I will punt you from the forums. STAY ON TOPIC.