Halo. In the world of first person shooters, many consider Halo to be up there with classics such as Goldeneye and Half-Life. And while the series has only been around for six years, it has spawned from rabid fans. It seems that people just can’t get enough of Master Chief, Cortana and the onslaught of the Covenant. With the release of Halo 3 coming sooner than we think, as well as the release of the Vista version of Halo 2, talk of Halo seems to be more prevalent than ever.

In order to fully gauge the anticipation of a game like Halo 3, you have to look back to its predecessor. To put it quite simple, Halo 2 was huge. After a successful first chapter that had sold over 5 million copies worldwide, Halo 2 was poised to be even bigger. With an advertising blitz to rival any big movie coming out in 2004, the fervor behind the game became almost unbearable for those waiting for it. When November 9th finally rolled around, and all the dust had settled, the game sold 2.4 million copies and earned $125 million US dollars in its first day of sales, making it the biggest release in not just video game, but entertainment history. Since then, Halo 2 has over 5 billion games played online and more than 9.2 million units sold. With numbers like that, it’s no surprise that Halo 3 has such high expectations.

Single Player

Although Bungie is keeping a very tight grip on the exact story of Halo 3, there are a few things that we can discern from the many ViDocs and trailers that we’ve seen. For one thing, Halo 3 (at least part of it) will take place on Earth. After the infamous cliffhanger ending to Halo 2, it’s pretty safe to say that Master Chief will come back to find that the Covenant assault has begun.

Another thing we can tell is that the Covies think that a Forerunner artifact, that can start them on their “Great Journey”, is located on Earth. To be more precise, it’s located around, the now destroyed city of New Mombasa. In Halo 2 it was found out that this artifact can activate seven identical Haloes that will wipe out all existence. There are many things that we, as the general public, are left to speculate when it comes to the story of Halo 3. With so many unanswered questions from Halo 2, there’s much to be speculated. What happened to Cortana? Why was she quoting T.S. Eliot’s poem “The Hollow Men”? What will become of the Elites and the Covenant now that the Brutes have taken their spot as the Prophets’ guards? Will the Arbiter be in the third installment? Will we see Master Chief’s face? And the ever burning question; what in the world was that giant plant?!

The Public Beta

Back on April 10th of this year, Bungie announced that a public beta was going to occur for Halo 3. Set to start on May 16th and end on June 6th, the rabid legions of Halo fans furiously began to mark their calendars and fine-tune their coughs to call in sick to make way for their first taste of Halo 3 goodness.

There were three ways that someone could get into the beta. The first way was by signing up on Halo3.com after the “Starry Night” commercial release. The second way was through the “Rule of Three” event. With this event, you had to be one of the first 13,333 people to sign up at Halo3.com after playing three straight hours of Halo 2 on Xbox Live during the first three days of February. The final and most common method of getting into the beta was by buying a specially marked copy of Crackdown. When a problem with the Crackdown access to the beta impeded people from downloading it, Bungie compensated by extending the beta to the 10th of June.

Since then, June 10th has passed and it didn’t take long for Bungie to release the statistics of the success the beta had. According to Bungie, over 820,000 unique players logged in to play Halo 3 and played over 12 million hours of online gameplay. To break that down, if a single person had played all 12 million hours, they would have played for over 1,400 years.

With statistics like that, it’s almost an understatement to call the beta a big success.