Birth Of A Nation

Halo 2: The video game that smacked down Spider-man. CP Photo/HO

Pity Sony Pictures. Sure, its blockbuster film, Spider-Man 2, shattered box-office records this summer with opening-weekend gross sales of $115 million US. Mere months later, though, the news of that movie’s mind-blowing feat was utterly upstaged. By a damned video game. You see, the real entertainment story last year was Halo 2, a sci-fi console game produced by Bungie Studios and Microsoft for the latter’s Xbox platform, which kicked off with opening-day sales of $125 million US.

Continuing the shoot-’em-up mayhem of the original title, Halo, the sequel recounts an apocalyptic battle between humanity, defended by a cybernetic super-warrior called Master Chief, and the Covenant, an aggressive alien civilization of religious fanatics. (One wag noted that the 2004 U.S. presidential race offered up more than enough battling between a lone robot and hordes of religious fanatics, but that’s another story.)

To say that Halo 2 was heavily hyped in the weeks leading up to its release is tantamount to observing that Canadians enjoy hockey and the occasional beer. In the six months leading up to its Nov. 9 launch, the game notched more than 1.5 million pre-orders (nearly 200,000 of them from Canada). Those figures had Microsoft predicting a $100-million opening day. That prediction, in turn, got everyone buzzing.

On launch day itself – the largest and most choreographed in video-game history – fans exhibited the sort of face-painting, homemade-costume-wearing fervour generally reserved for film openings like Return of the King, the last installment of Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy. Across North America, tens of thousands of eager fans lined up outside more than 7,000 stores for the game’s midnight release. At the Toys R Us in New York’s Times Square, where the national launch party went down, a countdown clock ticked away the final seconds of life before Halo 2. The assembled faithful cheered wildly in a scene that echoed the square’s venerable “New Year’s Rockin’ Eve” bash – except with a lot more guys wearing space helmets.

At the launch, Microsoft’s Peter Moore told MSNBC.com that Halo 2’s release marked a revolution not just for video games, but for the entertainment industry as a whole. “I've been in this business for five or six years and I have never seen a single title get this much attention. Halo nation is a fascinating cultural phenomena,” Moore said. “It is very clear to us that this kind of entertainment is usurping others.”

Industry insiders – not to mention Wall and Bay Streets – have known for years that the video-game industry has become, like the creepy Covenant critters of Halo 2, an unstoppable juggernaut. Consider this: according to one projection, video game sales pulled in $7.76 billion in the U.S. in 2004. The U.S. film industry’s domestic box office takings were not that far ahead, at $9.4 billion for the same period. True, there has been (and will be much more) significant (and highly profitable) cross-pollination between the two industries, with video-games based on movies and vice versa. But the growth curve of gaming has left Hollywood looking fidgety, especially in light of the recent spate of mega-flops like the talk-show punch line Gigli, the aimless Brad Pitt vehicle Troy and, most recently, Oliver Stone’s Alexander. Each of these films cost a fortune. Each went over at the box office like flatulence in an elevator.

Perhaps in response to that perceived slump, the weeks surrounding the Halo 2 launch saw video games, traditionally depicted in the mainstream as the sole province of spotty and maladjusted teens, touted as the Next Big Thing. In USA Today, for instance, technology columnist Kevin Maney suggested that Halo 2 represented a new “generation gap” between Boomers and Gamers. “The tables have turned,” wrote Manes, “and the axis is video games.” Writing for the Washington Post, Jose Antonio Vargas claimed that the game was “symbolic of a new wave of entertainment.”

Such bold pronouncements, found pretty much everywhere, raised a puzzling question: with billions in sales already stashed in the bank accounts of game developers, why was an industry that had Hollywood shaking in its boots being portrayed as an out-of-nowhere upstart? The most likely explanation is that prior to the noisy, super-sized launch of Halo 2, the video-game industry hadn’t yet found a recognizable public face, a universally acclaimed megastar. Video games were big but anonymous – just another multibillion-dollar industry like waste management, mining or pornography. Never mind that gaming hadn’t found its Tom Cruise. For most people, it didn’t even have an Adam Sandler.

Previously, the model for launching a video game was this: harness grassroots excitement, feed it with savvy, well-targeted marketing and create a product that people like. The result, if all goes well, is a profitable title. Gamers buzz about it and buy it in droves. Nobody else pays attention. Halo 2 took a different approach: Do all of the above while playing with Microsoft’s bankroll and marketing muscle, practically guaranteeing a launch that kicks Hollywood records six ways to Oshawa. Tell everyone, well in advance, that this is what you plan to do. Then actually do it.

Tony Walsh, a Toronto-based designer and writer of the weblog Clickable Culture, argues that the lasting resonance of Halo 2 will be its significance not as a game, but as a financial phenomenon – and from there, as a cultural force. “From an artistic standpoint,” says Walsh, “the game has given us nothing; from a business standpoint, it exceeded some pretty big expectations.” In its first month, Halo 2 eventually moved a total of about five million copies, banking $250 million. Not a bad return on investment for a title that cost about $20 million to produce. (Poor Sony again: Spider-Man 2 cost 10 times as much to make.) It gets better. Another Microsoft initiative, Xbox Live, allows gamers to play Halo 2 online for a monthly fee of about $6 US. By the time you read this, more than a million players around the world will have logged upwards of 30 million hours blasting each other to bits.

So put Halo 2’s continued success in the death-and-taxes column. It’s sure to push a lot more units and pull a lot more loot. Even if it disappeared without a trace tomorrow, though, people would forever revere it as the game that changed everything. Halo 2 gift-wrapped a message to the rest of the gaming industry – and the media world at large. It’s an old adage, but it’s the one that swung the game right past the intrepid Spidey in the news this year: money talks. It’s only when it talks louder than everything else that everybody starts listening.

Greg Bolton is a Toronto writer.