For the uninitiated, Halo 3 is the Microsoft video game for XBox. It's the follow-up to the hugely successful Halo, and Halo 2 games.
It's a shoot-em-up; Humans vs. the invading Aliens. The game went on sale at midnight Tuesday, with one Brigid Faranda standing on line in Ossining to buy it!
How did we get to that state? Well, Joe was thirsting/aching/dying for the game, and convinced Brigid to pick it up for him (he had pre-paid for it, so it was reserved). And I stupidly went along with it. This DESPITE the fact that we have banned television-watching and video game playing on Mondays through Thursdays. But we made an exception for Monday night (actually Tuesday morning), so that when Brigid got back from getting the game (arriving home at 12:50), Joe was allowed to play for about 75 minutes. So he didn't get to bed until about 2:15 in the morning. How dumb am I for going along with this?
And because Joe played Monday night/Tuesday morning, fair is fair, we had to let Tim play a bit Tuesday night.
Things caught up with Joe this morning, as he got up lately and we had to race to the train station.
Here's the NY Times coverage of the Halo 3 rollout.
Halo 3 Arrives, Rewarding Gamers, and Microsoft - New York Times
Bill Gates, the chairman of Microsoft, is the richest man on earth. R. J. Bollard, a freshman at the University of Washington, said he would have 73 cents left in his bank account as of midnight. And that’s one reason Mr. Gates is likely to be the richest man on earth for quite a while.
Both were at a Best Buy store in Bellevue, Wash., on Monday night as the third installment of Halo, Microsoft’s hit video game series, went on sale at 12:01 a.m. yesterday. Just before that moment, Mr. Gates was hand-shaking his way down the line of customers. Among them was Mr. Bollard, 18, who said the 73 cents was all he would have left after buying the game.
Even before the doors opened, more than 1.7 million consumers had preordered the game, which is available in three versions priced from $60 to $130.
“I don’t know how I’m going to feed myself,” Mr. Bollard said.
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For the serious gamer at least, all was forgiven yesterday morning. More than 10,000 stores across the country, many of them converted into miniature carnivals Monday night for fans awaiting the game, opened their doors to long lines of Halo fans who started camping out as early as Sunday afternoon.
Microsoft said it would not announce sales figures until today, but the new game has been expected to be the most lucrative introduction of any entertainment product. The previous game in the series, Halo 2, set a record for first-day sales in the entertainment and media industries when it brought in more than $125 million in the United States in its first 24 hours.
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In Atlanta, an arc of young men lined a balcony at Lenox Square, the city’s biggest shopping mall, as they awaited the game’s debut at a GameStop store. Ari Velazquez and Dan Gibson, roommates at the Georgia Institute of Technology, said they had converted their apartment into a sort of high-tech video game cave, sealing windows with blankets and cardboard and stocking up on ramen noodles, chips and white-cheddar popcorn.
“We expect that, like, no one’s going to go to class tomorrow, and the teachers are going to know,” said Mr. Gibson, 20.
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Joseph Hunter, 19, a student at Morehouse College in Atlanta, said the series has “sort of become an obsession” and said entire dormitories at Morehouse face off against one another in Halo combat.
Regarding Halo 3, he said, “I knew that if I didn’t have it, my life would be over.”
Halo 3 is rated M for mature, which means the game is not intended for sale to unaccompanied consumers under 17. Most customers in line appeared to be in their 20s and 30s, but there were also children accompanied by parents or other guardians.
Outside a Circuit City store in Miami on Monday night, Patty-Jo Toor, a nurse from Orlando, accompanied her son, Neil, 16, and two friends, Phillip Allanson, 15, and Alex Ferguson, also 15. She said the group had set up an Xbox 360 in their hotel room so the children could play all night after buying the game.
The other people waiting in line in Ossining, thought Brigid was the World's Greatest Mom to go out and line up to get the game for her son. She arrived at 11:30, and their were thirty people ahead of her. Good thing she didn't go to a big mall, where she might have had to arrive hours (days) in advance...
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