NY's 'Halo 3' launch nearly starts riot

At about 9:30pm on Monday, George Clooney waltzed into a midtown Manhattan hotel, the camera flashes of the paparazzi following him right into the lobby. But a block away at the Best Buy store on 5th Avenue and 44th Street, the fans waiting for the launch of Microsoft's Halo 3 videogame couldn't have cared less.

They had their own epilepsy-inducing lights, after all. New York's Halo 3 debut stopped short of pyrotechnics, but it was over the top in just about every other way.

"George who?" one person near the head of the queue joked when he heard the gossip. Like most of the queuers who'd shown up at the Best Buy store for the official launch celebration for the final instalment of the Xbox 360 game trilogy, he was young, male and sporting a Halo 3 t-shirt that had been given away as part of the festivities.

"We're more famous than him tonight," a nearby queuer added, gesturing at one of the many flat-panel TV screens that had been set up in the windows of the Best Buy store, projecting previews of the game interspersed with live footage of numerous NFL players from the New York Giants and New York Jets squaring off against one another inside. For this crowd, Clooney couldn't hold a candle to Master Chief, the iconic Halo protagonist who's been blasting away at aliens on TV screens since the original title launched in 2001.

Tech reporters and enthusiasts are well accustomed to the fact that Microsoft likes to pull out the public relations guns for a product launch -- remember Vista's debut? -- and Halo 3 was no exception.

An enormous spotlight beamed up over Fifth Avenue, and full-out lighting and sound equipment -- along with plenty of enormous TV screens -- dominated the ground scene. A team of Mountain Dew minions were walking around with trays of plastic shot glasses containing a seemingly endless supply of samples of its Halo 3-branded energy drink, 'Game Fuel'.

There was a guy in a Master Chief outfit, of course. Best Buy and Microsoft representatives were giving away t-shirts and other prizes to the fans who were willing to scream the loudest or wave their homemade signs (best one: 'MASTER CHIEF IS MY FATHER'). And in addition to the handful of local NFL players, rappers Ludacris and Chingy and R&B singer Bobby Valentino were also on-site to try out the game for the cameras.

And there were a whole lot of cameras -- Microsoft dominated the myriad big-screen TVs with its in-house coverage of the launch, but video and photo crews were around from every local television network as well as cable channels such as Spike TV and G4 that target the Halo demographic. There were also more than a few video bloggers and even a Justin.tv lifecaster, Sarah Meyers.

At first, it seemed as though the marketing and press were going to overshadow the actual pack of fans. There simply weren't that many of them in the queue at first; with fewer than 12 hours left, the line still stood at about 15 people despite the fact that 28-year-old Uche Nwachukwu, the first person to show up, had been there since 6pm on Sunday. Things didn't really pick up until schools and offices had cleared out for the day, and by about 7pm, the line was pretty respectable. By about 10:30pm, it stood at several hundred.