Halo Games Maker to Be Independent of Microsoft

Microsoft said yesterday that it was giving up its controlling ownership of Bungie Software, the video game subsidiary that developed the hugely popular Halo franchise, including its latest iteration, Halo 3.


Bungie, based in Kirkland, Wash., said it planned to return to its roots as an independent game studio, a move that eventually will cost Microsoft exclusive ties to one of the most successful and sought-after teams of game developers.

Harold Ryan, president and studio head of Bungie, said that he had been working for months on a plan to separate the studio from Microsoft, based in nearby Redmond, Wash. Mr. Ryan said that the companies had a good working relationship, but that developers at Bungie yearned to work for themselves, not a corporate owner.

“It’s an emotionally creative point of view,” he said of the decision to take the studio independent. “That’s the state we wanted to be in.”

Neither Mr. Ryan, nor Shane Kim, the head of Microsoft’s game studios, would discuss the financial terms. Microsoft originally acquired Bungie in 2000 for an undisclosed amount.

Bungie’s Halo games have been of singular significance to Microsoft in the development of its video game machine business.

Halo has been available exclusively on Microsoft’s Xbox video game consoles. That has meant the game’s popularity has helped drive consumers to the Xbox consoles rather than to competing systems made by Nintendo and Sony.

Microsoft said that since Halo 3 hit the market last week, it had rung up more than $300 million in sales. It has been selling at a faster pace than Halo and Halo 2, which combined sold nearly 15 million copies, Microsoft has said.

Mr. Kim said the separation furthered Microsoft’s aim of getting blockbuster hits for its consoles. “It was in our best interest to support Bungie’s desire to return to its independent roots,” he said.

At least initially, important aspects of the relationship between Microsoft and Bungie will remain intact.

Mr. Ryan said that Bungie planned to continue to develop games exclusively for the Xbox platform. He said that at some point, Bungie would have the right to develop games for other platforms, but he declined to say when.

Bungie has 113 employees. Evan Wilson, a video game industry analyst with Pacific Crest Securities, said that leading employees of Bungie had bought out majority ownership from Microsoft. “Bungie and Microsoft clearly had different creative directions,” Mr. Wilson said.

He added, “Bungie lost some key employees over the years, which while not uncommon for studios, may be an indication of that.”

Tags:Microsoft,Games,Sony,Xbox,Nintendo

The Conflicted Life of the Modern Immigrant Doctor

For all the griping about the sad state of the medical profession, immigrant families have never stopped propelling their children firmly in its direction. North American hospitals are increasingly staffed by these obliging children, some greeting patients with the exotic inflections of the newly arrived, some already assimilated into the pure vernacular.

They are doctors like Ming, Chen and Sri, who, along with their colleague Fitzgerald, grow from pre-med students into veteran doctors in Vincent Lam’s collection of intertwined short stories. Published in 2006 in Canada, where it won the Giller Prize for fiction, this lovely book breaks ground on several fronts, not the least of which is its depiction of the tentacles of obligation and expectation encircling these young people.

Doctors who write about medicine tend to dwell on the big themes: life, death, suffering, hope and the rest. Dr. Lam, a Toronto physician, covers that territory, too, but he also takes a pioneering look at the particular situation of the modern immigrant doctor, suspended by strong and often opposing ties to profession, cultural heritage and family, with patients who may seem as alien as if from Mars.

Thus, early in the book, Ming, Chen and Sri, medical students in Toronto, contemplate the tattoos over the biceps of their medical school cadaver with detached concern, as they would the hieroglyphics of an ancient civilization. They can decipher “RCAF — 17th Squadron” and the crude cartoons of Spitfire planes etched beneath it without much problem, but “The Lord Keeps Me — Mark 16” on the shoulder has them perplexed.

“‘It’s one of the four books in the second half,’ said Chen.

“‘What is that part?’

“‘Umm ... I don’t know...’

“‘It must mean something,’ said Sri.

“‘I’ll look it up for you,’ said Chen ...

“‘The manual shows,’ Ming said, ‘to cut here.’”

Ming is the classic pre-med overachiever, a plodder who specializes in brute memorization as she strategizes to ace exams. She votes to cut right through the tattoo, because that is where the textbook says to cut. She becomes an obstetrician; we glimpse her years later, a seasoned professional, thrust into a once-in-a-lifetime emergency that gives her no alternative but, for once, to break all the rules.

Sri, soft-hearted beyond all necessity or common sense, votes to preserve the tattoo. “You should respect a man’s symbols,” he says. “My mother told me that. Look at his arm. These are his symbols.” Even after years of training, Sri’s intractable kindness leads him away from the beaten path, as he wanders alongside patients more like a guardian angel than a medic.

Chen, a bland, pleasant, responsible guy, is descended from Chinese expatriates in Vietnam (like Dr. Lam himself) with an extended family scattered over the globe. As a medical student, he spends a summer in Australia, trying his best to minister to his dying grandfather, a vice-ridden, womanizing patriarch as colorful as Chen himself is colorless. Chen becomes an E.R. physician (again like Dr. Lam), working shifts that vary between stultifying and terrifying. He commutes to work in a fast, expensive car, playing an aggressive game of chicken with the drivers in the next lane, the kind of reckless risk-taking behavior he cannot indulge in anywhere else.

All are recognizable types, drawn with precision and affection. Fitzgerald, though, is a little different: he is more a novelist’s creation, a real tragic hero. The only Anglo among them, an incompetent with chopsticks, he is the true outsider in the group, an obsessive philosopher always just a little out of step with his colleagues and his profession.

The others never question their place in medicine; Fitz never stops questioning his, until he is plunged directly into the SARS outbreak that gripped Toronto hospitals in 2003. The rest of the world may have forgotten those few months of terror, but hospital workers in Canada glimpsed the apocalypse, as we clearly see here.

This is not a perfect book. It has its share of blood-and-guts cowboy medicine suitable only for network TV, and a few too-facile resolutions of various improbable plot twists. Still, Dr. Lam, whose mentors include the author Margaret Atwood, has enough talent to sculpture a story considerably more nuanced than the usual thinly disguised autobiography doctors like to call fiction. Presumably much of the book is, in fact, memoir, but the joints between the imagined and the recalled are seamless, and the fiction does its job of turning mirror into magnifying glass.

Readers will have become fully immersed in these characters before they realize that each has only one name. The students Ming, Chen, Fitz and Sri graduate from medical school to become Dr. Ming, Dr. Chen, Dr. Fitzgerald, Dr. Sri. Are they all going by their last names alone, a macho band in green scrubs? Are they icky-sticky first-name doctors like Oprah’s Dr. Phil? Do the Asians have the tongue-twisting ethnic names that have forced them to create short nicknames, yet one more sacrifice of identify? We never find out.

Perhaps it is simply a demonstration that a single name suffices for people whose other name quickly becomes “Doctor.” So the wily author both distances us from his characters, and draws us near.

Tags:Doctor,Life,medical,death

No Glamour, but Sandwich Is a Star

IS there any pain quite as sweet as the one caused by a steaming drip of cheese oozing from between slices of just-grilled bread and onto your lower lip?


Buttery, salty and enduringly simple, the grilled cheese sandwich stands unrivaled in the universe of simple gastro-pleasures. It is the gateway sandwich to the land of hot sustenance, the first stovetop food many children learn to prepare by themselves.

But in Los Angeles, the grilled cheese is less a starting place than a destination, an object of outright mania, not just at workaday coffee shops but also at any number of well-regarded restaurants, where it’s slathered with short ribs, decorated with piquillo peppers or topped gently with a quail egg.

Thursday is grilled cheese night at Campanile, a standard-bearer of Italian dining in Los Angeles, and the restaurant’s busiest night, when the tables bustle with families, hot daters, girls-night-out revelers downing prosecco, and divorced dads hoping to buy good will from their estranged children.

The Melt Down, a restaurant in Culver City devoted to the gooey sandwich, has lines out the door at lunch. Every April is grilled cheese month at Clementine, a lunch spot near Century City, with an elaborate new theme each time.

For the past four years, this city has also been home to the Grilled Cheese Invitational. Roughly 600 people show up at an unpublicized address, armed with frying pans and camping stoves, and are given 20 minutes to demonstrate their grilled cheese prowess. (One year, a contestant constructed an eight-foot grilled sandwich rendition of “The Gates” by Christo and Jeanne-Claude.)

Whether created with fresh-baked sourdough and enhanced with tangy green garlic, or slapped together with Wonder Bread and Kraft Singles, the grilled cheese sandwich is nothing less than consolatory after you’ve spent a long day sitting in traffic on the 405 freeway.

Buck Down, one of the organizers of the Grilled Cheese Invitational, sees its appeal this way: “It may very well be the ultimate comfort food, and one thing Los Angeles is about is insecurity. If you have to live here for your job, your entire career is predicated on insecurity, because you’re either going to be replaced, fired or exposed as a fraud. What better way to get comfort than grilled cheese?”

Of course, Los Angeles is more than the entertainment industry, and the grilled cheese sandwich appeals well beyond its corridors, as three months of happy trekking through diners from Hollywood to Culver City showed.

The classic Los Angeles grilled cheese, like the $5.95 version served at the 101 Coffee Shop in Hollywood, begins with perfectly buttered sourdough bread, topped with cheddar and perhaps a nice tomato, grilled to tawny perfection, its contents stretching appropriately with each bite. It is perfectly paired with a Coke (not diet, thanks).

But high-end grilled cheese owes a debt to Nancy Silverton, who began grilled cheese night a decade ago when she was working behind the bar at Campanile, which she formerly owned. She wanted something to increase business on a slow night. “But more importantly, I love grilled cheese sandwiches,” said Ms. Silverton, who now runs Pizzeria Mozza and Osteria Mozza here.

“That goes back to the junior high school cafeteria in Tarzana, where I was addicted to the super-greasy ones. I have upgraded my cheese preference, but that is where my love of grilled cheese went back to.”

It wasn’t long before grilled cheese night became the hottest day of the week at Campanile, and it remains so, says its current chef and owner, Mark Peel, Ms. Silverton’s ex-husband.

On a recent Thursday night, my 4-year-old and her friend worked through a classic, a Gruyère (no mustard) perfectly pressed, while the two adults shared a version with chickpeas and tomatoes, more salad than grilled cheese, really, and a Gorgonzola number with spiced walnuts and honey (not for beginners).

Many other chefs have their own exalted version of the sandwich. At the Foundry on Melrose, Eric Greenspan has a grilled cheese that weds taleggio cheese with short ribs, arugula and apricot caper purée on raisin bread.

Mr. Greenspan served raisin bread with his cheese courses and thought it would translate well in grilled cheese sandwiches. He added the meat because, he explained, a chef with ribs on the menu tends to have short rib scraps lying around anyway. (I have provided a recipe that does not call for ribs, presuming that like me, you have a lack of short rib scraps in your kitchen.)


I ate one in near silence in his kitchen over a white linen napkin, unable to turn my attention from this slightly spicy (arugula), decidedly messy (cheese and short ribs) and pleasantly salty amalgam.

“Grilled cheese is basically fat on fat on fat,” Mr. Greenspan said cheerfully.

Just because a 9-year-old with mildly permissive parents can find grilled cheese nirvana on her first time at the stove, that does not mean there are no secrets to the perfect sandwich.

Chefs agree: butter, room temperature and lots of it, must be spread all the way to the crust, to prevent the bread from taking on a soggy center with dried edges. This is not toast!

Further, the sandwich must be minded so that it does not scorch, a common transgression. “Bread quality matters,” Mr. Greenspan said, “but butter quality matters more.”

Quinn Hatfield, the chef at Hatfield’s, prepares most of his restaurant’s signature croque-madame, made with raw hamachi and prosciutto on toasted brioche with beurre blanc and topped with a quail egg.

“I end up throwing away 30 percent of the sandwiches that other people make,” he said. “It’s really a tricky maneuver because you’ve got to fry the bread in a lot of butter but not let it get too hard.”

Plenty of home cooks have taken grilled cheese to a superlative form, as well. The grilled cheese invitational here started as something of a joke among friends, said Mr. Down, an organizer. By year three, he said, the event had become so competitive, the organizers had to stop publicizing it. And yet, it grew.

Grilled cheese artisans compete in three categories: missionary (bread, butter and cheese), kama sutra (sandwiches with meats or other ingredients and fancier bread) and honey pot (dessert sandwiches). On 50 feet of tables, contestants fry the sandwiches and then divide them into quarters. They are placed on paper plates with ballots stapled to them, which runners bring to the judging table.

Sandwiches are graded on presentation, taste, Wessonality (“What makes this sandwich special,” Mr. Down explained) and style. One recent winner featured polenta fried two times with Brie, prosciutto and pesto.

But really, let’s not get too carried away. I prefer to belly up to the counter at the 101 for a basic grilled cheese, pondering as I eat the whereabouts of my high school friend Joe Puleo, who whipped me up government-issue cheddar versions after my cocktail waitress shift at Cheek to Cheek in Kalamazoo, Mich. Because really, for any native-born American, the first thing grilled cheese tastes of is home. In that lies its true appeal.

Tags:Glamour,Sandwich,cheese ,Gorgonzola