Halo 3 (2007) - $170 million on day one, and the ad showed a hand-built diorama instead of the game

September 25, 2007, in North America and Australia

Hello, Toki here. Episode 66 of "Today Is Release Day". Today's game is one whose advertising became more famous than its plot.

Halo 3 was made by Bungie and released by Microsoft on September 25, 2007, on the Xbox 360. North America and Australia had it on the 25th, Europe on the 26th, Japan on the 27th. That makes today its nineteenth anniversary.From the thumbnail of "Halo 3: Believe" (Bungie, YouTube)

It was the third game in the series, and its slogan was "Finish the Fight". The story had been left hanging at the end of the second game, and here the Master Chief brought it to an end.

What I want to dig up today is not the story, though. It is how this game was sold, and how it was received.

The ad showed no gameplay. It showed figures at one-twelfth scale

The campaign Microsoft ran before release is known as "Believe".

It is set in a future "Museum of Humanity". Elderly veterans look back on a finished war and talk about a man called the Master Chief. Behind them stands a large exhibit that reconstructs the battlefield. That was the shape of it.

The exhibit was not computer graphics. It was a physical model built by New Deal Studios and Stan Winston Studios. It covered more than 1,200 square feet and stood more than twelve feet high. The figures were at one-twelfth scale. Actors stood in for the marines, and their expressions were captured and used for the faces of the miniatures.

The ruined city is said to have been modelled on real bombed-out streets. Rather than turning the game's art into a model, they pulled the model towards the real world.

The campaign is estimated to have cost around ten million dollars. And it won a Grand Prix at the 2008 Cannes Lions. A game advertisement did.

How it landed - $170 million in twenty-four hours, $300 million in a week

The numbers had no precedent at the time.

According to Microsoft, 1.7 million copies were pre-ordered in the United States, and the game took $170 million there in its first twenty-four hours. The company called it the biggest launch not only in games but in entertainment, ahead of Spider-Man 3 and the Harry Potter releases.

The first week passed $300 million worldwide. On Xbox Live, 2.7 million people played it in that week, for a combined forty million hours. The first day alone accounted for 3.6 million hours. Close to thirty million achievements were unlocked in the week.

Reviews were strong too: the Metacritic average was 94. By January 3, 2008, it had sold 8.1 million copies, and it was the best-selling game of 2007 in the United States.

It was not all praise, though. Reviewers said the single-player campaign was short, and too short on lower difficulties or with four players in co-op. Some said the friendly marines were less clever than the enemies, and some called certain textures coarse.

The biggest launch in entertainment, and a complaint that it was too short, sit in the same week. Only the record still gets quoted, which feels a little unfair.

Players were handed the tools to rebuild the maps

If I had to pick one thing this game left behind, I would pick Forge.

Forge let players place and remove objects on multiplayer maps: weapons, crates, vehicles. A budget capped how much could be placed, and players worked within it. A tool from the making side was handed straight to the playing side.

Theater was on the same disc. It saved up to a hundred matches to the console's hard drive, to be watched back afterwards from any angle and at any speed.From the thumbnail of "Finish The Fight | Halo: The Master Chief Collection - Halo 3" (HALO, YouTube)

Play it, record it, rebuild it. That all three sat in the same box in 2007 looks early from here. More than the numbers, this is the part I want to keep.

Nineteen years on, Halo 3 also runs on PC

Halo 3 stayed an Xbox exclusive for a long time. It became playable on PC in 2020, when it was added to Halo: The Master Chief Collection.

That is thirteen years after release. A slow port, for a game about finishing the fight.

Japan, incidentally, got it on September 27, 2007, two days after North America. Read against a Japanese calendar, then, this piece is running two days early.

Even so, September 25 is September 25. Writing down that kind of coincidence is what this column is for.

Let me write the year down: 2007

September 25, 2007. If I do not write the year down like this, a piece never feels finished to me. Today, September 25, 2026, makes it exactly nineteen years.

More than the $170 million, what stays with me is the decision not to show the game. A game nobody had played yet was presented as a war already over. As a way to sell something, that is unusual.

And inside the game, players were being handed the tools to rebuild the maps. Outside, it was sold as the past; inside, it handed out instruments for the future. It sounds mismatched, but both belong to one disc.

Is there a game whose advertising you remember better than the game itself?