N’Gai Croal writes on Newsweek’s Level Up:

“Back in August, we conducted a series of interviews with Bungie for a Newsweek magazine story about Halo 3 that for a variety of reasons never came to fruition. One of the people we spoke with was Halo 3 writing director Joseph Staten, whom we first met when we began seriously writing about videogames back in 1999. In Part I of our two-part Q&A with Staten, who also authored the novel ‘Halo: Contact Harvest,’ Staten discusses how the story for Halo 3 emerged from the ashes of the truncated final act of Halo 2, the interplay between a games script and the game itself, and how the writers’ room at Bungie operates.”