Next 'Halo' has street cred

College students across the nation should mark Sept. 25 on their calendars. Why? It’s the day Halo 3 is released for the Xbox 360.

While college is all about learning to live on one’s own with responsibility, trying new things, and meeting new people, it’s also about gaming with groups of friends until the wee hours of the morning.

Since being released in 2004, Halo 2 has shown that without proper supervision, college students become slaves to their television screens in large groups, unable to move or put down their controllers. In the two and a half years since being released, Halo 2 has sold 9.2 million copies around the world. That’s a lot of video games (roughly 498 copies for every one Cal Poly student).

How big is Halo 3 going to be? The game is coming in three different versions, the most expensive of which comes with a scale model of the main character’s helmet. Microsoft is creating a special edition of its Zune mp3 player that has game trailers, videos, and artwork pre-installed on it. Microsoft’s VP of Interactive Entertainment is calling Halo 3 “the biggest entertainment event of the year.” At Cal Poly alone there are 10 Halo-related facebook groups, with many of them specifically focused on particular dorm buildings (Sequoia, Santa Lucia, and Yosemite all have their own Halo communities).

The great thing about Halo is that it transcends its role as a “video game,” something which the general populace and the “cool” people don’t waste their time with. Halo is “legit”; it has street cred. People who would never dare pick up a game controller for fear of social rejection by their peers are more than happy to jump into a team slayer, 50 frag-limit multiplayer map on Lockout, or help their buddy get past some of the Arbiter’s more challenging campaign stages. On any given Saturday night, the most hardcore nerds and geeks will sit down together for a couple rounds of Halo, and somewhere across town a similarly sized group of the buffest jocks and frat members will be doing the same thing.

That’s a pretty big accomplishment for a video game.

The proliferation and popularity of Halo didn’t really hit me full-force until recently. I went to a friend-of-a-friend’s house one weekend and to my amusement discovered the people who lived there were big on Halo. Not only were the big on Halo, but they had actually constructed a screen divider that fit over the front of their television (I surmise with their Cal Poly engineering education). It divided the TV into quadrants to ensure that there was no cheating happening during four player matches.

It takes a special kind of someone to go out of their way to physically create a supplementary TV accessory that is both durable and functional for the sole purpose of enhancing the experience of one video game. Some students don’t even spend that much time with homework in a single quarter. How did we get to this point? How did a seemingly innocuous new video game that first came out in 2001 spawn a dedicated fan base of epic proportions?

Part of it, at least, is that the game is accessible. It’s complex enough to promote strategy, forethought, and teamwork while at the same time being simple enough for the average John (or Jane, in some cases) Doe to pick up and have fun with. There’s also a genuine appeal in blasting your friends sky high with a well-placed grenade, or causing them to back-flip in mid-run with a surgically accurate sniper round.

The game can be enjoyed in long, caffeine-induced marathons, or in short spurts right before heading to the bars and parties. And because so many people play, it’s not hard to find a fellow Halo player at any given social event.

Sept. 25 is the second Tuesday of the 2007 fall quarter at Cal Poly. It’s just early enough in the year to take a day off and get started on your 25 to 35 hour a week Halo 3 quota without falling behind in your classes. Welcome the third coming of your hopeless addiction.

Justin Fassino is a journalism senior and Mustang Daily staff writer.