On May 15, 2007 the news was published, that Halo 3 would be released on September 25 in North America and the 26th in Europe. Halo 3 marked the third in a wildly popular series for the Xbox 360 called ‘Halo’. According to the vice president of Microsoft’s interactive entertainment business, Halo 3′s release was much more than only a video game release, it was the biggest entertainment event of the year. He might just have been right as well.

The full history of Halo 3 really has to start with the release of the first game in the series ‘Halo: Combat Evolved’. In November, 2001, when Halo was first published, game consoles were something of a nonsense as one-person shoot-em-up games. Yes, some games existed, but there weren’t the popular communities 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 was the first to limit 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.

Enthusiasts 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 over 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 thought that that was not enough.

The game took over $300 million gross in the United States in just its first week. Overall, it has sold over nine million copies worldwide and was the best-selling video game in the United States in 2007. Even the critics loved it, ranking it the seventh highest on the list of Xbox 360 all-time great games.

The Halo 3 release date, like the release date of many wildly popular video games was almost like a holiday like Christmas or Easter. It leaves us with the question of what will happen with video games in the future?