E3 has seen many exciting announcements from more companies than you could count without taking your shoes and socks off. However for all the new things at E3 to ooh and aah over, fans of Halo were been sorely disappointed this week and it looks as though there might finally be an explanation for why there was no sign of a Bungie announcement at E3.

Bungie Studios (developers of Halo) was acquired by Microsoft 8 years ago but split off from the computer giant last year, however Microsoft does have publishing priority over other publishers. In other words, the big M gets first dibs.

Over the last few weeks, Bungie Studios (the developers behind Halo) had been dropping hints as big as boulders about an announcement that would be made at E3 this year. This week an open letter went up on the Bungie website apologizing for having to cancel the announcement, but unfortunately it didn’t shed much light on the matter other than it hadn’t been Bungie’s decision to pull it.

“For the last several months, we’ve been building toward a reveal of something exciting that Bungie is working on. We were looking forward to sharing that with our fan community during the week of E3. However, those plans were just changed by our publisher.

We realise that many of our fans are disappointed by this turn of events; members of the Bungie team share that disappointment."

When the right time comes, we look forward to sharing this exciting announcement with you. Until then, we appreciate your continued support and patience.”

According to the LA Times, Don Mattrick, senior vice president of Microsoft’s Xbox games business, said the company decided to pull the Bungie announcement because they felt they would not be able to do it justice within the time constraints of their press conference (which had to be trimmed down to 1.5 hours instead of 2.5).

"We had an embarrassment of riches," Mattrick said. "We felt we could do this game more justice with a more dedicated event."

The company also left out GTA IV and while Mattrick is positive about these omissions (stating that even with the omission of “two big kahunas” they had managed to put on quite the show, we do feel a little sorry for Bungie and Halo fans who seem to have gotten the short end of the Microsoft stick.