The good ole’ pirates over at Bungie seem to be abroad on the wild seas again, har har! Bungie’s famous old in-joke invoking pirates and a bottle o’ rum gets revived apparently as a user on the IGN forums spotted someone playing Pimps at Sea online on Xbox Live. Did they finally decide to implement their April Fool’s joke or is this a mere cover-up?

The infamous Pimps at Sea running gag started on April 1st 2001, and has been prolonged every year since. The game was supposedly some sort of combination between real-time strategy and Sid Meier’s classic game Pirates. The joke has been taken to the extents of making-of videos and a special controller being ‘released’ to support the game’s unique gameplay.

Now however several users, of which one confirmed Bungie employee, have been spotted actually playing the game on public Xbox Live servers. The player you see above in the picture is called ‘New0001′, which is the default name for Halo 1 multiplayer gamers. It all adds up to Bungie covering something up in their traditional mocking way and well what else could that be than live Alpha testing after the previous months of testing on the debug network? Like IGN, all we can think of is Halo 3. If you’ve got better ideas, share below! Meanwhile, don’t forget to sign up for the beta this Monday.