On May 15, 2007 the news was out, that Halo 3 would be released on September 25 in North America and 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 the biggest entertainment event of the year. He might just have been right as well.
The full history of Halo 3 really has to start with the publication 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 as one-person shoot-em-up games. Sure, some games existed, but there weren’t the popular following that the PC games in the genre had.
That was all changed in Halo, in which players could fight aliens on foot and in vehicles, in order to complete 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 in turn, meant forcing the player to make strategic decisions in order to complete his missions.
People waited for the release of Halo 3 with baited breath. They awaited the continuation of the one-person, shoot-em-up combat format that had been prevalent in the two former parts of Halo. Microsoft calls it the ‘Golden Triangle of Halo’, which consists of gun-type weapons, grenades and others. In reality, this was not new to one-person, shoot-em-up games, as it had existed since the very first Doom and even the precursor to that game, “Wolfenstein”.
So, with all of that previous history, people were full of excitement over 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 took over $300 million gross in the United States in only the first seven days. 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 liked it, putting it the seventh highest in the list of Xbox 360 all-time great 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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