Just in case you were wondering.


File Share maintenance is complete and everything should be back in working order.  If you have no clue what we're on about, don't sweat it.  You didn't miss any fun, just a brief tune up.  Carry on.

Winners have been notified.


As you may have already guessed from the subject of this blog post, if you participated in Roger's Recon Hunt yesterday, you should be firing up your copy of Halo 3 to see if you've won.  If you did, you'll have a nice new armor permutation to rock.

All told we saw nearly 4,000 submissions, with 438 providing the correct answer to Roger's puzzler.  Of course, we also saw plenty of players who were thoroughly tripped up by the format itself.  It seems, "put the answer in the subject line" proved to be quite the conundrum in its own right.

So how many players ultimately earned Recon?  More than we promised.  What are the gamertags so you can send them explicit messages notifying them that you don't personally feel they deserve their new duds?  Uh, nice try.

If you entered and didn't win, thanks for participating.  We hope you had fun.  If you didn't enter, why are you reading this?

How about a nice game of Tag?


Since we know not everyone has access to an Xbox 360 for Bungie Day, Roger thought it would be cool to run a Bungie.net contest for Recon. If you were planning on spending the rest of the day wallowing in your own terrible misery while everyone else jumped into Halo 3’s Matchmaking for their shot at Recon, it’s time to dry those tears and get focused - iIt’s puzzle time.



Hi everyone,

It's Bungie Day, and I feel like handing out some Recon. So let me tell you a story...

There's a cool event that happens every year or so at Microsoft called Puzzlehunt. Teams of a dozen, many of whom work at Microsoft, spend an entire weekend without sleep solving puzzles created by that year's hosts, fitting into a theme. Two years ago (when we were still at Microsoft), the team hosting Puzzlehunt 11 invited me to join them in writing game-themed puzzles. How could I resist coding a puzzle into the stats result of a made-up game of Halo 2? What's more, the guys at RvB were about to stop by for an early look at Halo 3, so I whipped up a quick script and asked if they'd perform and record it. They were happy to, and it became the intro to this puzzle.

The puzzle been sitting, hidden, on Bungie.net for almost two years since then, so just for fun, we'll let you take a crack at it for a chance to win Recon. Be warned: it's not at all easy, since it's meant to be a challenge to the types of people in and around Microsoft who spend a weekend each year solving puzzles for 36 hours straight. But it is solvable, since most of the teams got it.
Keep reading to see how you can get Recon.

The theme for this Puzzlehunt was Tron - teams were zapped into the computer by an evil program, and had to solve puzzles to do battle with him, and eventually escape with the help of friendly video game programs they'd meet along the way. This video introduced the Halo puzzle:

Red vs. Blue: How About a Nice Game of Tag?

Players were then directed to this page, which is the puzzle itself. You don't need to navigate away from this page to solve it. Just click the links that change what you see in the main image.

Want to play for recon? We've set up a Bungie.net account to receive your answer. Simply send a Bungie.net private message to this user with your answer as the subject. The answer is a single word. We'll search through the PMs and give Recon to the first five correct answers who we deem to be provided by legitimate solvers (so don't write a script to submit a word list! And we'll check for answers automatically, so be sure to spell correctly.) We’ll also pull a couple of random users with the correct answer out of the pile too, so if you don’t get it right away, keep at it until you have it solved.

Employees of Bungie or Microsoft, participants in Puzzlehunt 11, or others who have had similar exposure to the correct answer, are not eligible. Players who post the puzzle answer to our public forums, share it via PM, or otherwise distribute the answer will be banned from both winning Recon and from Bungie.net. Plus, they’ll only be hurting their own chances by adding more players to the random drawing.  Oh, and there's a discussion thread attached to this article.  Please use it.

Happy Hunting.

Autographed art, up for auction.


The Seattle branch of the American Red Cross has a pair of autographed Bungie items up for auction on Ebay.  This charity provides disaster relief right in our neighborhood, so we saw fit to send them over a copy of The Art of Halo 3 and a limited release embossed Halo 3 poster, both laden with Bungie autographs.  You should bid on them.  It'll make us happy.  Step Seven and all that.

The Art of Halo 3

"This is an autographed version of the the book, "The Art of Halo 3," signed by the entire staff of Bungie, the Developer of Halo 3! This book was donated to the American Red Cross Serving King & Kitsap Counties by Bungie to help raise funds for local disaster relief! It is in perfect condition."

Halo 3 Autographed Embossed Poster - Limited Release

"This is an embossed Halo 3 poster, signed by the staff of Bungie, the developers of Halo 3. This is a limited release of a poster for Halo 3 that was donated to the American Red Cross Serving King & Kitsap Counties to raise funds for local disaster relief. 100% of the proceeds will benefit disaster relief.

Size is 22 x 34 and it is in perfect condition."

Seattle Area American Red Cross

"The American Red Cross saves lives. When disaster strikes, we respond with food, shelter and hope. When barriers of distance, language or warfare separate loved ones, we open lines of communication. When families, co-workers and communities must prepare for emergencies, we help them take action.

Each year in our community, we bring together 1,500 people to care for their neighbors, train 80,000 people in life-saving skills and respond to a disaster about once every 40 hours. In emergencies large and small - a house fire, an earthquake, a flood - right here in our community or on distant shores, people can count on the Red Cross."