Microsoft appears to be looking for a way to spread the Halo message across multiple platforms, and if you're the right guy for the job, maybe you could go work on it.
This guy wants to check his stats, but all he has is an iPhone. Microsoft, help!Joystiq received a tip over the weekend about a Microsoftjob listing seeking the following individual:
Do you love Halo? Do online social communities and console video games excite you? Do you love building scalable online infrastructure & websites for large and passionate audiences? The Halo franchise studio is looking for a strong software development engineer with a passion for video games and online services. We have an ambitious task ahead, taking the current Halo community and online gaming support system and bringing it to the next level.
We're looking to blend console, web, and mobile to create an immersive Halo world that follows the dedicated Halo fan wherever they go. We need engineers that can build connected technology while working in a startup environment.
As an engineer on this team, your responsibility will be to deliver a great out-of-game interactive experience that takes the next step beyond the systems found in Halo 3. You will work with artists, designers, developers and testers to finalize design plans, implement those plans, and help coordinate large-scale testing of the out of game Live experience by gamers across the world. Your work also will involve several external teams-including other MGS studios and the Xbox Live team-coordinating development dependencies and design considerations of experience as a whole.
OK, so they want to create some sort of Halo World that connects Halo fans to the Halo universe on devices like mobile phones, which are somehow not yet Halo-enabled, or Xbox 360s, which are somehow not yet Web-enabled. What, exactly, does any of this mean? That's a bit harder to say. It could be a big upgrade of the Halo website stuff that Bungie has already done for Halo 2 and 3, with an eye toward bringing that content to mobile phones. Or maybe it's the start of something much bigger. The entry also states...
For this year this position is focused on infrastructure, including high efficiency scalability simulation.
So whatever it is, it's probably not going to launch this year. But if this were just an expansion of the current site that brought the stat tracking features to other platforms, wouldn't most of that work be done already? There are a few interesting bits in this job listing that make this sound like it could be a lot bigger than simply building a mobile version or Xbox-friendly version of the existing website. Stuff like "out of game Live experience" and "integrated mini-games" makes it sound like it could be anything from an a calendar to plan your clan matches (much like Killzone 2 has) to a full-on Halo-themed virtual world.
Of course, that's all just idle speculation on my part. But I guess it does lead me to a question. Are you at all interested in a overarching, multiplatform place to keep up to date with the universe of one series of games, even if that universe is one as popular as Halo? Or does the existing Halo site's stat tracking fill your needs?
