Wednesday, August 26, 2009

When Was Halo 3 Released?

By Casey Jones

On May 15, 2007 the news was out " the Halo 3 release date would be 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 publication was more than just a video game release, it was the biggest media event of the year. He may just have been right.

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 released, game consoles were somewhat of a joke as one-person shoot-em-up games. Sure, some games existed, but they didn't have the popular following that the PC games in the genre had.

That was all changed in Halo, in which players could battle aliens on foot and in vehicles, in order to complete objectives, while trying to unravel the secret of the Halo. Halo pioneered limiting the number of weapons a player could carry to two, which in turn, meant forcing the player to take strategic decisions in order to complete his missions.

People waited for the publication of Halo 3 with baited breath. They awaited the continuation of the one-person, shoot-em-up combat format that had been dominant 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 actuality, this was not 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 not enough.

The game grossed $300 million in the United States in just the first seven days. Overall, it has sold over nine million copies worldwide and was the best-selling video game in the USA in 2007. Even the critics loved it, putting it the seventh highest in the all-time list of Xbox 360 games.

The Halo 3 release date, like the release date of many wildly popular video games was almost like a national holiday like Christmas or Easter. It beggars the question of just what will happen in the realm of video games in the near future?

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