E3 06: Halo 3 Officially Announced

May 10th, 2006, 00:48 Posted By: wraggster

Via Gamespot

Microsoft officially unveiled Halo 3 during its E3 press conference today, and the company released a trailer for its highly-anticipated sequel on the Internet and its Xbox Live service. Halo 3 will be the first Halo game designed for Microsoft's Xbox 360 console, and the importance to the company was highlighted by the fact that Bill Gates, Microsoft chairman and chief software architect, was on hand to help announce the game.

When the trailer was shown to the audience at the Grauman's Chinese Theater, where Microsoft held its annual games briefing, the crowd erupted. Halo 2 ended in a cliff-hanger, with the Master Chief, the hero of the Halo series, returning to Earth in the midst of a climactic battle between the Convenant, an alien coalition, and Earth's defensive forces. The Halo 3 trailer begins with a slow shot of the dusty African plains. Wreckage litters the landscape, and a woman's voice is heard. It's Cortana, the artificial intelligent construct that is Master Chief's chief ally. In brief, cryptic sentences, she talks about "being the source," and she sounds like she may have been somehow combined with Gravemind, the intelligence behind the Flood, another alien menace. As the Master Chief enters into the frame, she says in a distorted voice, "I know you. Your past. Your future."

Suddenly, Convenant Ghosts and battleships appear in the skies. The music swells, and in the distance, a huge hatch slowly opens in the ground. A bright beam of light begins to build, blinding the camera. Cortana then chimes in, "This is the way the world ends." The Bungie logo then flashes on the screen, followed by the text: "Finish the fight in 2007."

Bungie, the internal Microsoft studio that created Halo, also released the trailer onto the Internet, and a high definition version was put up on Xbox Live Marketplace, the online service available to Xbox 360 owners. To quote the accompanying text found on Xbox Live, Halo 3 is about Earth under Convenant rule: "With its defensive forces, all but obliterated, Earth has fallen to the unstoppable might of the Convenant. These alien occupiers have discovered something beneath the ancient African sands - something incredible... something Forerunner." The Forerunners are an apparently extinct alien race that built huge artificial ringworlds called Halos, and the Halo games have focused on the mystery surrounding these strange objects.

The importance of a new Halo game for the Xbox 360 cannot be underestimated. The original Halo was a launch title for the first Xbox, and was easily the biggest hit, driving sales of that system. Halo 2, which launched in 2004, became a cultural event, with thousands of gamers lining up for hours for the midnight launch. Halo 2 made entertainment history by generating $125 million in sales in one day. However, Microsoft didn't mention Halo 3 at all during last year's Electronic Entertainment Expo, and fans had been left wondering when the software giant would finally drop the big news. Well, the waiting for news of Halo 3 has now come to an end. Now they'll have to wait to 2007 for the game itself.

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