This holiday season is going to be very promising for games, and Halo 4 has to be at the top of the list for most anticipated title along with Call of Duty: Black Ops 2, which also hits shelves this November.
It’s good to see that fans are salivating for games this season, because the market suffers a lot of abrupt ups and downs, and the recession didn’t help either, but so far things look very promising.
As we often see with movies, anticipation and hype can get out of hand, to the point where we wind up disappointed no matter how good the game is. But according to a report on GamingBolt.com, Frank O’Connor, who is in charge of the franchise at 343 Industries, doesn’t want gamers to worry.
Of course there will be doubters and haters, and O’Connor said, “It won’t be perfect, that’s impossible. But I think the vast majority of people who have given us their trust and confidence, no matter how warily or askance, will find something in here that meets or exceeds their expectations.”
As O’Connor continued, “For the cynics, an understandable position and one we respect, I think the game may even surprise you guys. Of course time and player experience will tell, but there have been many moments that deepened my confidence in where we are.”
Time will tell indeed, and it’s just around the corner on November 6. While looking for Halo news I stumbled upon something I’m amazed I hadn’t seen before, but this year a book came out whose time has come. It’s called Generation Xbox, written by Jamie Russell, and it’s about Hollywood and gaming trying to come together.
Going over the story at StickWiddler.com, what especially caught my attention was the book goes into why the Halo film never came together, and that’s probably a whole book in itself. According to an agent at CAA who spoke to Russell, it was Microsoft’s “unwillingness to reduce their deal” that “killed the deal. Their unwillingness to reduce their gross in the deal meant it got too top-heavy.”
Neill Blomkamp, (District 9), who was going to direct Halo, also said, “When you have a corporation that potent and that large taking a percentage of the profits, then you’ve got Peter Jackson taking a percentage of the profits and you start adding all that stuff up, mixed with the fact that you have two studios sharing the profits, suddenly the return on the investment starts to decline so that it becomes not worth making.”
Blomkamp also added that “the suits” weren’t happy with his take on the film. “Thing was though, I’d played Halo and I played videogames. I’m that generation more than they are and I know my version of Halo would have been insanely cool.”
Halo is currently a multi-billion dollar science fiction video game franchise (originally created by Bungie) managed by 343 Industries and owned by Microsoft Studios. The property has expanded exponentially since the early days of Combat Evolved, and now includes Halo 2, Halo 3, Halo Wars (RTS), Halo Reach, Combat Evolved Anniversary (HD) and Halo 4.
There are also multiple bestselling novels and graphic novels which have sold quite well (the Halo Graphic Novel shipped more than 100,000 copies), with a number of them appearing on Publisher Weekly’s bestseller charts. Tor’s first three novels sold more than one million copies by April 2000, while Ghosts of Onyx, Contact Harvest, The Cole Protocol and the first volume of Cryptum made the well-respected New York Times bestseller lists.
