Corona | Coming Attractions

It's now out. Copies of Halo: Reach went on sale starting at 12:01 AM today at stores holding special launch day events for the Microsoft Xbox 360 title. Halo: Reach is expected to be one of the year's bestsellers, and early indications are holding up that expectation. Gamers across North America turned out dozens to hundreds deep to be amongst the first to own a copy of the title, and sales of the three versions are in the top five slots overall at Amazon.com (and that includes the $149 Legendary Edition of Halo: Reach.)

The game is the final one that its creators at Bungie Studios will make. The company, which has designed all of the Halo games to date, signed a deal earlier in the year with rival video game publisher Activision that will see their next title ship under that banner. Of course Microsoft will continue to publish games set in the Halo universe; when the IP has made $2 billion dollars in game sales alone, no one at Bill Gates' company is slowing this train down anytime soon.

Halo: Reach is a litmus test of sorts. It's not dependent on the main character from the original Halo trilogy, the nameless Master Chief. Instead, Microsoft is hoping that gamers will identify with a new group of Spartan superwarriors, a six-person team known as Noble Squad. That's not to say that Master Chief doesn't turn up in Reach somewhere; since it's a prequel to the first Halo game, Microsoft has hinted that we'll see some, if not all, of the origin of the hero during the fall of Reach to the alien Covenant forces.

Stay tuned for the exact sales figures of Halo: Reach during its launch day. When Halo 3 came out in 2007 it made $170 million in its first 24 hours.