"Prepare to drop," cryptic Halo 3 video teases

Wait ... drop what? A Halo 3 expansion pack? A whole new game? Fifty-nine bucks? Even hard-core Halo fans are stumped, and Bungie ain't talkin'.

The mystery began on Monday night, when Bungie—developer of the wildly popular Halo franchise—posted an ominous-looking countdown on its Web site. (Well, actually, several mysterious goings-on preceded the countdown; I'll leave the details to 1UP.com.)

The countdown ended Thursday morning—the first anniversary of the Halo 3 launch—at exactly 7:07 a.m. PST, with the arrival of 62-second teaser video: A futuristic city, as seen through surveillance cameras. One cam pans up to the sky, zooming in on a distant formation of hurtling ... asteroids? Probes? Hard to say, but there's a lot of them. The probes tear down into the city. Explosions, then darkness. Static, then a few messages: "Please remain calm," "pardon our dust," and "keep it clean." The system "reinitializes," and then a warning: "Metropolitan disaster!" Shots of the city, in ruins. And at last, as a final probe crashes straight into the camera lens: "Halo 3 ... prepare to drop."

Whoa … so what gives? Gamespot immediately fired off a query to Bungie, which reportedly replied with a mere "neg" (for "negative," natch).

Theories abound, of course. Gamespot has an exhaustive analysis of the video, concluding that the "probes" are, in fact, something called "Orbital Shock Drop Troopers," and that the game itself is the same Halo project ("a cross between Ghost Recon and Gears of War") that was reportedly pulled from Microsoft's E3 press conference at the last moment.

Meanwhile, Kotaku fired up Xbox Live and found the description for the teaser video, which promises that "action and deep mystery await players in this new Halo 3 campaign experience." Hmmm … "campaign experience," eh? Kotaku's take: We might have an expansion pack, and not a whole new game, in our future.

Rabid Halo fans on the Bungie.net forums have, of course, already begun a frame-by-frame analysis of the video. Among the discoveries: What appears to be a date—1/06/09—hidden in a clump of garbled computer code. A release date, perhaps?

So, what's your guess? A whole new game? Expansion pack? Something else entirely?

Related:
Bungie drops Shock-Trooper Halo 3 teaser [Gamespot]