 |
 |
|
Halo will be seven years old tomorrow (the original game was released Nov. 15, 2001). It started as an experiment. Could Bungie, a company that made shooters for the Macintosh, make a shooter for Microsoft's new console system? It turned into a juggernaut.
Bungie was acquired by Microsoft and then last year split from them. Microsoft retains the rights to all things Halo, but Bungie is still in the picture and the series is still going strong. Bungie is working on Halo 3: Recon, a fall 2009 expansion that adds a new campaign with a new hero, presumably set on Earth while the Covenant are invading. There have been five Halo novels as well as a graphic novel. A sixth novel subtitled The Cole Protocol is due out on November 25th.
But after the jump are ten things I bet you didn't know about Halo.
1) Halo secured a spot in the Guinness Book of World Records for being one of the best-selling game of all time, with a total of 26 million copies sold across three titles.
2) Master Chief is the only videogame figure at a Madam Tussauds Wax Museum. A 7'2" tall 275-pound Master Chief was unveiled at the Las Vegas Madam Tussauds on the occasion of the Halo 3 release.
3) The logo from Marathon, one of Bungie's earlier games, has a prominent place in Halo 3. At the end of the game, Master Chief has saved the galaxy from the alien Covenant, the zombified Flood, and the actual Halos, which were galactic weapons of mass destruction. However, he's stranded himself in deep space in the process. So he put himself into suspended animation to await rescue. Roll credits. But a secret ending shows him drifting towards a planet with the Marathon logo. Easter egg or teaser?
4) Halo was released at a time when shooters were almost exclusively the domain of PC games. How times have changed. Now the average shooter is developed primarily for console systems and occasionally ported to the PC. You have the success of Halo to thank/blame for that.
5) The next Halo game isn't a shooter. Instead, Halo Wars is a real time strategy game for the Xbox 360, created by Ensemble Studios, the creators of Age of Empires. It'll be released early next year.
6) Right now there are 113,579 people playing Halo 3 online (by way of contrast, there are 35,102 people playing the popular PC shooter Counter-Strike online).
7) The above screenshot won top honors in a Halo 3 birthday contest held by one of the Xbox Live community managers. Players were asked to use the Halo 3 playback feature to recreate scenes from the Halo series. There were enough entries that they are arranged here in chronological order to retell the story of the Halo games.
8) This famous scene of someone being killed by a ricocheting traffic cone has been seen 1.9 million times. This famous scene of a sniper being killed by his own bullet has been seen 1 million times.
9) The Halo movie is effectively dead. The rights are still jointly owned by Universal and Fox. The original director, Neil Blomkamp, publicly blames that joint ownership on the collapse of the Halo movie. Pirates of the Caribbean script-writer Stuart Beattie submitted to Microsoft a spec script based on one of the Halo novels, but don't hold your breath. Spec scripts are a dime a dozen in Hollywood.
10) Halo's unlikely celebrity endorsement: "I've stayed up all night playing Xbox. Halo is the only game I play. It's the only game I know how to play and I'm not very good. But I will play it obsessively." That was Julia Roberts in a 2006 interview.
Frakjack
Welcome to Eureka
Carter's Car Dodge
By Radjago at 9:22 AM ON 11/14/08
* Halo secured a spot in the Guinness Book of World Records when it hit 26 million copies sold and became the best-selling game of all time.[citation needed]
By Sonic_13 at 9:50 AM ON 11/14/08
Halo did not sell 26 million copies. I don't know where you got your data, but it is just plain wrong. The Xbox itself only sold 24 million units.
On the second anniversary of Halo 2's release, Bungie issued a press release. In their own press release they clearly state Halo sold only 5 million copies: http://www.bungie.net/News/content.aspx?type=topnews&cid=7139
By ImJon at 12:42 PM ON 11/14/08
The "* Right now there are 113,579 people playing Halo 3 online..." comment is misleading. You're showing Halo 3, a recently released game against Counter-Strike a game released nearly in 1999, no duh Halo 3 is going to be ahead.
By IwasThere at 1:11 PM ON 11/14/08
It started as an experiment. Could Bungie, a company that made shooters for the Macintosh, make a shooter for Microsoft's new console system?
That is just plane wrong. Halo started out being built for mac, the development was changed to PC due lack of support for high end games on the mac at the time. Microsoft bought the Bungie to acquire the rights to Halo. The fan base was huge when the game was going to be release for the PC, which is one of the reasons Microsoft wanted to make it an XBOX exclusive, to drive the demand for their new console.
This article gets a F- for lack of research.
By Terminus0 at 1:42 PM ON 11/14/08
This article has informed me of several things I didn't know about the Halo series, unfortunately they are all made up.
What the hell is monolith?
By blue at 1:50 PM ON 11/14/08
I think they mean 26 Million copies on all platforms for all of the Halo games (1,2,3) not just Halo. seems plausible to me.
By sanity at 2:07 PM ON 11/14/08
26 million for all 3 games over all-formats is plausible, but that still doesn't make it the best selling game. Tetris sold over 30 million, and if you're adding up series entries across formats the 2D Super Mario platform games sold something like 80 million.
By sanity at 2:09 PM ON 11/14/08
I bet management wanted more comments so we're being baited with obviously wrong numbers...
By fatal_error at 4:42 PM ON 11/14/08
"By Sonic_13 at 9:50 AM ON 11/14/08
Halo did not sell 26 million copies. I don't know where you got your data, but it is just plain wrong. The Xbox itself only sold 24 million units."
did you ever think of the PC version?
By Tom Chick at 5:32 PM ON 11/14/08
Ha, you all fell for my insidious plan to get hits and comments!
Actually, that was some sloppy editing on my part, so apologies. The Guinness thing is some pap about fastest selling, and the numbers are for all three games together. Thanks for all the corrections.
By Xbox Joe at 9:08 PM ON 11/14/08
Nobody said that Halo sold 26million copies. What was said was that the COMBINED sales of Halo, Halo 2 & Halo 3 = 26million copies. Assuming an average price of $40 per copy - That's $1Billion is sales over 7yrs. If you want to be rich - don't make movies, make video games!
By Sonic_13 at 2:11 AM ON 11/15/08
@XBOX JOE
The statement was altered. Just read the comment above yours. Also, if you look at the first comment it has the original statement which did not include the "sold across three titles" part.
Still, that is not a record. Just look at the original Super Mario Bros. series. Super Mario Bros. 2 + 3 alone sold 28 million.
By radjago at 10:26 AM ON 11/15/08
You could also note that Halo Wars is a return to Halo's roots as the original game started life as an RTS, basically Myth in space, before it evolved into the multi-milllion selling FPS it is today.
By shizwipe at 7:07 PM ON 11/15/08
How retarded...anybody who actually plays Halo with any regularity already knows everything in this article that is accurate. The one that really gets me is this: "Halo was released at a time when shooters were almost exclusively the domain of PC games." What a load of garbage. Whoever wrote this article doesn't play games. Anybody remember 007? Shooters have been in heavy production for consoles ever since the early 90's. "Almost exclusively" isn't just misleading, it's just plain wrong. If you get paid to write this do your research.
By xTdub at 6:53 PM ON 11/16/08
@sonic_13: Just to jog your memory, Halo 1 and Halo 2 are available for PC, not just xbox.
By Sonic_13 at 12:39 AM ON 11/17/08
Yes there are on PC, but their sales are included in the 26 million, are they not? Thus it doesn't matter because Super Mario Bros. still sold more.
By obonicus at 7:37 AM ON 11/17/08
Wow, Halo fans are like NMA fans, but less literate.
By stargate at 5:48 PM ON 11/18/08
banana
By me at 9:06 PM ON 12/10/08
the article doesn't say the franchise has the record for most sales...it says it is one of the best-selling franchises.