Stay with me as this might get complicated.

The mysterious counter on Bungie’s website got to zero, but no announcement was made. Instead, a letter on the website discussed the reason behind the no-show:

"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 out fan community during the week of E3. However, those plans were just changed by our publisher.

"We realize 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."

Damn you! So we have to wait that little bit longer to see what Bungie is cooking up, but who is this publisher? Luke Smith of Bungie posted who the publisher is on NeoGaf, confirming it as Microsoft.

So why would Microsoft pull the announcement? Microsoft stole the show with the Final Fantasy 13 announcement, so announcing Bungie’s new game may have taken away some of thunder. Another possibility is that Microsoft knew what Sony and Nintendo had planned and thought they could keep this in until later in the year, a potentially wise decision seeing that Sony and Nintendo failed to deliver any shock announcements of their own.

The drama doesn’t stop there. Microsoft’s head of Xbox business Don Mattrick confirmed in an interview with MTV that the new Bungie game is in fact a new Halo, and when asked if this was Peter Jackson’s Halo Chronicles or Ensemble’s Halo Wars, he said, “The Bungie game is something else.”

We don’t know what the hell is going on, but expect some response from Microsoft and Bungie soon. Leizpig anyone?