The only question about Bungie‘s upcoming Halo: Reach video game is how big a blockbuster it will be. The game developer announced today that the next installment in the Halo series will debut on Sept. 14.
The series itself has sold more than 34 million units since the first Halo launched in 2001. And Bungie said today that the multiplayer beta for Halo: Reach drew a record 2.7 million players in the past couple of weeks. The game is one of the marquee exclusives coming this year for Microsoft’s Xbox 360. The rest of the game industry has been warned: Avoid launching your game on Sept. 14 or suffer the consequences. Anyone who tries to get attention at the same time this game launches will be in for a surprise.
Halo: Reach is a prequel in chronology to the Halo games and it does not include the main character Master Chief. It takes place on the planet Reach, whose destruction was chronicled in the first Halo novel, Halo: The Fall of Reach. I played the multiplayer beta and thought there were some great additions such as jet packs. Characters include the members of Noble Team, a squad of Spartan warriors fighting the invasion of the Covenant alien alliance.
“‘Halo: Reach’ is the culmination of a decade of ‘Halo,’ a franchise that has become a global entertainment and pop-culture touchstone,” said Phil Spencer, corporate vice president of Microsoft Game Studios at Microsoft.
Spencer said that Halo: Reach will help make 2010 the biggest year in Xbox history (yes, a vague statement, but evidently a reference to the highest expected sales for Microsoft’s game platform). Microsoft said players completed more than 13 million online games during the beta test, which is now over, and logged over 16 million hours of online game time. That adds up to 1,826 years of total play time in just two weeks.
Microsoft will milk gamers this fall. The standard edition of the game will be $59, while the limited edition will sell for $79 and the legendary edition will sell for $149. Gamers can preorder now. After this series is finished, Bungie will work on a game set in a new universe for Activision Blizzard, while Microsoft will produce more Halo games using different game developers.