Many Halo fans were perplexed by Microsoft Corp’s announcement that it would be producing a new free-to-play shooter called Halo Online that will only be available in Russia. A few enterprising modders gained access to Halo Online’s code and promised to create a port of the game for Western audiences, but they were quickly hit by a DMCA takedown notice from Microsoft. Now, some of those modders have stated that they will go ahead with the port anyway, regardless of what Microsoft may say.

“Woovie,” a member of the team working on the Halo Online mod, told Torrentfreak that the code from the game had been acquired through a leak.

“Microsoft is probably quite bothered by what we’ve done already as these files were leaked. We obtained the files from a user on 4chan’s /v/ board,” Woovie said.

While Microsoft has taken several steps toward shutting down the modders, such as issuing a DMCA notice to GitHub to remove the leaked code from its servers, Woovie says that the team is not particularly worried.

“In terms of DMCA/C&D mitigation, we have made redundant git backups on private and public git servers,” Woovie said. “This is to ensure we will always have one working copy. These are being synchronized so that data is always the same. Further DMCAs may happen potentially, it’s not really known at the moment. Our backups will always exist though and we will continue until we’re happy.”

Neoshadow42, another member of the mod team, admits that using leaked code in this way falls into some shady moral territory, but he feels justified in this case.

“As someone involved in game development, I’m sympathetic with some developers when it comes to copyright issues,” he told Torrentfreak. “This is different though, in my opinion. The game was going to be free in the first place. The PC audience has been screaming for Halo 3 for years and years, and we saw the chance with this leak. The fact that we could, in theory, bring the game that everyone wants, without the added on stuff that would ruin the game, that’s something we’d be proud of.”

Image credit: Microsoft Corp (c)