Late night in Bellevue: Halo 3 launch party
“Beautiful weather for a game launch is it not?” said Alex Dunn of Everett Washington. It’s as if the heavens had blessed the rainy city with a night of reprieve as the biggest game on the planet was about to launch. Although technically Halo 3 wasn’t officially released until September 25, the party did get its start early.
Even if stores across the country were creating their own events, from Texas to Toronto, only 4 sites were chosen as official launch sites for Halo 3: Los Angeles, New York, Miami and Seattle (although technically it was in Bellevue).
Hundreds of fans gathered around the Bellevue Best Buy, counting down the hours, then minutes then seconds until the door would finally open and let them in to get their copies of the game. There were gifts to be distributed to the eager fans: t-shirts, baseball caps, posters, giant scarabs, and pizza. All the swag given out was mostly due to the sponsorship provided by the folks at Bungie, Microsoft, Mountain Dew, Hero Clix and Best Buy amongst others.
We met an old acquaintance from PAX, David Dreger aka Knuckles Dawson who also happens to write for xbox360fanboy.com who gave us his impressions of the game itself. Apparently, everyone has a lot to forward to. “Halo 2 made Xbox Live on the original Xbox, Halo3 is going t make Xbox Live on the 360,” he said. “Things will be fucking amazing.”
As the hour passed and the final hours prior to release expired, some guy named Bill Gates showed up to wave at the crowd and shake a few hands. Later on, he signed the first copy sold of the game to an Issaquah lad named Ritesh David who says he plays the Halo series everyday. He even mentioned never playing Bioshock.
Earning $170 million in it’s first 24 hours, broke sales records in almost every entertainment field. For example, Spider-Man 3, the current one day box-office champ, took in approximately $150 million on its opening day. N’Sync owns the record of most albums sold in one day with one million copies. The only item to surpass the incredible sales of Halo 3 is Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows which sold $207 million worth of books.
That’s a lot of books and video games. Maybe someone should be paying attention somewhere.