A week after saying it was "basically done," Bungie has sent the hotly anticipated shooter to the factory.
Just over a week ago, Bungie announced that Halo 2 was "basically done." Today came the now-anticlimactic announcement that the game is officially done. "Halo 2 has gone gold. We finished every line of code, every pixel of art, every frame of animation, every phoneme of dialog and every note of music," said Bungie in a statement. "We finished it when we said we would (when it was done) and shipped that baby right on time to make its November launch date."
For anyone unclear on what "going gold" actually means, the author of the Bungie statement broke it down in detail. ""Gone Gold" is a somewhat archaic expression, since the "gold discs" are actually digital tapes and eventually silver discs," read the statement. "But it certainly feels golden. This basically means that the game has been shipped to retail manufacture. Somewhere in the world, a gigantic DVD pressing factory has started making Xbox game discs with the utterly complete version of Halo 2."