It's a rumor that's been scattered across the net for some time but Bungie has finally admitted it's "very likely" another developer created a DS version of Halo. However Bungie says that there has "never been an officially funded or sanctioned development of any sort of DS Halo game" from Bungie.

Speaking to Siliconera, Bungie's Brian Gerard and Frank O'Connor candidly tackled the subject of Halo DS. They confirmed that "every once in a while it does come up" and that Microsoft could potentially publish it through THQ, as it did before with age of empires: Age of Kings on DS.

Having said that, O'Connor doesn't believe the DS is well-suited to the FPS genre: "The problem is the DS is not an FPS console, right? It's not an FPS handheld. There really is no such thing. If we did something cool I would like to see it. But I would rather see the Halo IP on any handheld system applied to a different genre because handhelds don't necessarily do FPS well," he added.

So where does that leave Halo DS? Well, O'Connor thought that the brand could work better if it was "side-scrolling shoot-'em-up or whatever, but not necessarily an FPS" and that Bungie would never rule it out. "There is nothing going on right now", O'Connor concluded.

via IGN