Bungie Podcast

The Bungie Podcast was started on August 26, 2006. It is available on iTunes, and is one of the most popular gaming podcasts. It currently consists of nine episodes, with a new episode coming out nearly each week.

Episode I
The first episode of the show featured Frank O'Connor and Brian Jarrard, also known as Ske7ch, in a fairly formatted and planned out show. Guest stars included Jay Weinland and a man named Bob, who read the Bungie Waambulance.

Episode II
The second episode again featured Frank O'Connor and Ske7ch, the regular hosts, but they were also joined by Luke Smith, who has gone on to become the third regular host of the show. They were joined by their guest, Lars Bakken, and they talked about multiplayer, as well as E3 2007.

Episode III
The third episode of the Bungie Podcast featured the main three hosts, as well as Bungie writer Joseph Staten, who became the guest after Paul Bertone, the lead Campaign Designer for Halo 3 didn't show up. The show was released after E3 2007, and so Frank and Ske7ch talked about doing demos for press people at E3, while everyone talked about Joe going to Comicon the following weekend.

Episode IV
The fourth show, which pushed the show into being 'hilariously regular', featured Jamie Evans, the Test Manager, talking about testers working on Halo 3. They noted that the number of people working on the game is a huge amount, and that testing games is not as easy as it sounds.

Episode V
The fifth show featured Dan Miller, or DMiller, talking about Campaign Mission Design. In this show, the name of the second mission of the game was revealed to be 'Crows Nest'. It was also revealed that Dan Miller was the designer for the second and final missions of the game. Also, Ske7ch wasn't present in this episode, because he was doing promotional events.

Episode VI
In the sixth episode of the show, Luke Smith and Ske7ch hosted while Frankie was out of the office, and they had Damien Isla as their special guest. The three of them talked about AI in Halo 3, specifically how much smarter and fun it was to fight against as well as the impact that equipment had on the AI programming and scripting.

Episode VII
The seventh episode of the show again featured all three hosts, this time with two special guests. Lars Bakken returned to co-host for the second time, alongside Tyson Green, another multiplayer designer. The group of five talked about Forge, Halo 3's multiplayer map editor, discussing how fun it was, how easy it was to use, and what kind of impact it had on gameplay, as well as how the Halo 3 multiplayer community would potentially use Forge to create completely unforseeable content for the game.

Episode VIII
The eighth episode of the Bungie Podcast featured Paul Bertone, the Campaign Design Lead who skipped out on being the guest in the third episode of the Podcast. They talked about the Campaign mode of the game, and how it was no longer a single player experience, it was much more of a Campaign mode that could be played with up to four players at once. They also talked about Campaign Scoring, and the impact that that made on personal bragging rights.

Episode IX
Released on September 20, 2007, just five days before the release of Halo 3, this nearly two hour long episode was highlighted by a visit from Marty O'Donnell to talk about the Halo 3: Original Soundtrack. Joe Staten stopped by again to talk about his book Halo: Contact Harvest and Chris Gossett, the Web Development Lead, stopped by to talk about the upcoming changes to Bungie.net.

Episode X
The tenth episode of the Bungie Podcast, the first episode to be released after the release of Halo 3, featured the main hosts of the show as well as the Executive Producer of Bungie Studios, Jonty Barnes. Throughout the course of the hour, the four men talked about Halo 3 ranks, as well as Jonty's past in the video game industry, which included work at Lionhead Studios and Bullfrog Studios before that. Also, the group continued the feature now called the NFL Minute, in which they talk about that week's football action. This version of the NFL Minute was unique in the fact that during its course they proceeded to make fun of Jonty, who is British, and his faithfulness to English 'football', known in the states as soccer.

Episode XI
The eleventh episode of the Bungie Podcast guest starred Bungie's Dave Dunn, who told all about events in Bungie History from ten years ago to today. In it, Alex Seropian is bashed, Chris Carney is mocked, and many other interesting stories are told, but overall, the Halo 3 news was very minimal, if non existant. Paul Bertone did return to host the NFL Minute. During that, the results of Luke Smith's and Bertone's first match of Smith's 'Beat The Designer' Challenge were discussed.

Credits
The Bungie Podcast is hosted by Frank O'Connor, Brian Jarrard, and Luke Smith, is mixed and mastered by Steve Lopez, and is Produced by Tom Gioconda and Chris Gossett.