This past week saw the launch of “Halo 3″ — the hotly anticipated, long awaited, final chapter in the “Halo” trilogy. While I’ve never really been all that interested in “Halo”, what I am very interested in is what this means for the future of the Xbox 360. I mean, this was it… this was what everyone was waiting for. “Halo 3″ was The Big Kahuna — the Xbox 360’s killer app. If anyone had been putting off the purchase of the Xbox 360 until the day “Halo 3″ launched, Tuesday, September 25, was it.

Reaching sales of $170 million on its first day, the record breaking numbers have exceeded expectations. Despite tales of scratched discs and confirmation from “Halo” developer, Bungie, that the game runs natively at 640p — not true high-definition resolution — the game continues to sell. Reportedly, the game even sold out in certain places in Japan — a region that has, traditionally, been cold to American companies like Microsoft. The game has been, thus far, a worldwide success. With the marketing push provided by Microsoft, however, should this be any surprise?

The hype surrounding “Halo 3″ eventually became a self-perpetuating force. It reached a fevered pitch that had people — many of whom had never even heard of “Halo” — running around, just trying to figure out what it was all about. Microsoft sponsored a NASCAR vehicle which, by the way, suffered a mechanical failure and could not finish the race. Meanwhile, the car sponsored by Nintendo and featuring an ad for Wii came in third. Make of that what you will… “Future Weapons”, a Discovery Channel show which covers advanced, real, kill-you-dead weaponry, dedicated a whole episode to the weapons in “Halo 3″. There were TV commercials, radio commercials, convenience store promotions, and more. Indeed, the hype had reached such proportions that it became manifest in flesh and went tearing up the country-side in a futile attempt to satiate its ravenous hunger for the attention span of all humanity. There was no escaping it; Microsoft was sparing no expense on advertising for “Halo 3″ to make sure that EVERYONE knew it was coming. The thing about hype, however, is that it sometimes has connotations to methods and means that are, or could be, disingenuous. In other words, it’s hard to say that “Halo 3″ is the greatest game ever conceived and delivered to us from on high when there’s plenty of other games that are just as good — some, even better. And yet, that’s pretty much what we’ve been bombarded with.

Whether or not “Halo 3″ is deserving of the attention it’s garnered is a matter of opinion, but with the stakes so high, Microsoft couldn’t allow chance to be a contributing factor in its success. There could be no question that, as we head into the 2007 holiday season, the one game everyone must play is “Halo 3″ — and the only way to play it is on the Xbox 360. After allocating $1 billion to address all those Xbox 360s that suffered hardware failures and the dreaded “Red Ring of Death”, sales of the Xbox 360 are more important than ever in order to recoup that cost — on top of development costs, advertising costs, and more. “Halo 3″ did, indeed, signify the future of gaming — for Microsoft.

While games like “Bioshock” and coming games like “Mass Effect”, “Rock Band”, “Guitar Hero III”, and even games for other platforms such as “Super Smash Brothers”, “Super Mario Galaxy”, “Eye of Judgment”, and “Little Big Planet” should not be forgotten in the wake of “Halo 3″, it’s important to have a little perspective and look at just exactly why this game was hyped so much. After all, seeing as how the game is just another first-person shooter, swimming around in a sea of first-person shooters, giving the game special treatment hardly seems fair. Of course, it IS “Halo 3″, and to a great deal of people, that means a lot. With over a million preorders coming in months before the game’s release, I’m quite confident that “Halo 3″ would have sold very well — even without the marketing blitz to end all marketing blitzes. The thing is, as much as the world wanted “Halo 3″, I’m sure that Microsoft wanted it more.