On Monday Ensemble Studios founder Bruce Shelley expressed his thoughts on the upcoming closure of the studio by Microsoft. Today, Gamasutra has posted up a story on a project that they claim was under development at the studio in the past; an MMO based on Microsoft's Halo shooter franchise.

Much of the info comes from concept artwork and screenshots (like the one seen above) that Gamasutra says came from a "Ensemble-linked online artist portfolio" web site. In addition, rumors that Ensemble might be working on such a project popped up on web sites two years ago. However the story speculates that the Halo MMO was internally cancelled by Microsoft before its existance could be officially announced sometime in 2007. If true this is only the latest development in Microsoft's failure to come up with their own MMO project as announced games like Mythica ,Citizen Zero, and Marvel Universe Online were later cancelled and their Asheron's Call MMO games were later bought back by their developer Turbine.