On May 15, 2007 the news was out, that Halo 3 was due to be released on September 25 in North America and on the 26th in Europe. Halo 3 marked the third in a very popular series for the Xbox 360 called ‘Halo’. According to the vice president of Microsoft’s interactive entertainment business, Halo 3’s release was much more than only a video game release, it was to be the biggest entertainment event of the year. He may just have been right too.
The history of Halo 3 really starts with the release of the first game in the series ‘Halo: Combat Evolved’. In November, 2001, when Halo was first published, game consoles were somewhat of a joke for one person shooter games. Yes, some games existed, but they didn’t have the popular communities that the PC games in the genre had.
That all changed with Halo, in which players could battle aliens on foot and in vehicles, completing objectives, while trying to unravel the secret of the Halo. Halo was the first to limit the amount of weapons a player could carry to two, which meant forcing the player to take strategic decisions.
People waited for the Halo 3 release with baited breath. They awaited the continuation of the one-person, shoot-em-up combat format that had been dominant in the previous two versions of Halo. Microsoft calls it the ‘Golden Triangle of Halo’, which consists of gun-type weapons, grenades and others. In actuality, this was nothing new to one-person, shoot-em-up games, as it had existed since the very first Doom and even the predecessor to that game, Wolfenstein.
So, with all of that previous history, people were full of anticipation and excitement about the Halo 3 release date. How popular and welcome was the game? Well, before its release, 3.1 million copies were sold in advance orders and retailers were sure that that was insufficient.
The game grossed $300 million in the United States in just its first week. Overall it has sold over nine million copies worldwide and was the best-selling video game in the United States in 2007. Even the critics loved it, ranking it the seventh highest on the all-time list of Xbox 360 games.
The Halo 3 release date, like the release date of many widely popular video games was almost like a holiday like Christmas or Easter. It beggars the question of what will happen with video games in the future?
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