Rumours that Microsoft would announce a new Halo game spread like wildfire yesterday after a screenshot of Xbox.com's Achievements page showed space allocated for 'Halo Reach'. The day before, however, when we recorded our season premiere of That Aussie Gamecast discussing and predicting the outcome and announcements of E3 '09, our very own Drew was laughed off for predicting that a new Halo would be announced at Microsoft's press event. I would like to formally apologise to the guru himself because this morning Halo Reach was confirmed and teased.

After showing Halo 3: ODST, Bungie's Joe Staten basically said, "But wait, there's more" and debuted a teaser trailer for the Bungie created Halo Reach to be released in 2010.

The trailer itself is a single shot circling Earth with military radio communication describing the first encounter with Covenant forces. The last thing you hear is, "...we've got Spartans on the ground. We're not going anywhere." at which point the hairs on the back of my neck stood to attention and the right side of my mouth cocked a subtle smile.

We can safely assume that this is based on the Halo novel The Fall of Reach and if they don't combine the 6 Halo novels (So far) into a single game or trilogy this could mean both a massive earner for Microsoft and a complete and utter over saturation of the Halo franchise to the point where it dies as Scrooge McDuck would die - a decrepit old corpse resting upon it's billions and billions.

Still, I'm really excited about this.