From the Brow of Zeus

Over at Fidgit, the SciFi Channel gaming blog I read obsessively, Tom Chick has a new list of ten Halo factoids you probably didn't know about.

Halo will be seven years old tomorrow (the original game was released Nov. 15, 2001). It started as an experiment. Could Bungie, a company that made shooters for the Macintosh, make a shooter for Microsoft's new console system? It turned into a juggernaut.

I think one of the reader comments sums it up nicely:

"This article has informed me of several things I didn't know about the Halo series, unfortunately they are all made up."

• Halo secured a spot in the Guinness Book of World Records when it hit 26 million copies sold and became the best-selling game of all time.
• The logo from Monolith, one of Bungie's earlier games, has a prominent place in Halo 3. At the end of the game, Master Chief has saved the galaxy from the alien Covenant, the zombified Flood, and the actual Halos, which were galactic weapons of mass destruction. However, he's stranded himself in deep space in the process. So he put himself into suspended animation to await rescue. Roll credits. But a secret ending shows him drifting towards a planet with the Marathon logo. Easter egg or teaser?
• Halo's unlikely celebrity endorsement: "I've stayed up all night playing Xbox. Halo is the only game I play. It's the only game I know how to play and I'm not very good. But I will play it obsessively." That was Julia Roberts in a 2006 interview.
  

Best selling game of all time? Julia Roberts? Monolith?

A quick check at Wikipedia reveals Super Mario Bros. for the NES is still the best selling game of all time, at least according to Guinness.

Is Tom having fun at the expense ofHalo fans, or has something gone seriously wrong over at Fidgt? I just saw an ad for the website on the Sci Fi channel yesterday, so maybe the influx of readers had something to do with it. It's probably just one of those days.

When I tried to post a correction in the comments, Word Press told me "Text entered was wrong. Try again." Now *that's* irony.

UPDATE: Tom said it was all a case of bad editing. The facts and figures have been corrected. Now just one question remains: Where the heck can I get a copy of Monolith?

Labels: videogames