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On May 15, 2007 the news was published ” the Halo 3 release date would be September 25 in North America and the 26th in Europe. Halo 3 marked the third in a wildly popular series for the Xbox 360 called Halo. According to the vice president of Microsoft’s interactive entertainment business, Halo 3′s publication was more than just a video game release, it was the biggest entertainment event of the year. He may just have been right.

The full history of Halo 3 really has to start with the release of the first game in the series ‘Halo: Combat Evolved’. In November, 2001, when Halo was first published, game consoles were something of a joke as one-person shoot-em-up games. Yes, some games existed, but they didn’t have the popular communities that the PC games in the genre had.

That all changed with Halo, in which players could battle aliens on foot and in vehicles, in order to complete objectives, while trying to unravel the secret of the Halo. Halo pioneered limiting the number of weapons a player could carry to two, which in turn, meant forcing the player to take strategic decisions.

People waited for the release of Halo 3 with baited breath. They awaited the continuation of the one-person, shoot-em-up combat format that had been dominant in the two former versions of Halo. Microsoft calls it the ‘Golden Triangle of Halo’, which consists of gun-type weapons, grenades and others. In actuality, this was nothing new to one-person, shoot-em-up games, as it had existed since the very first Doom and even the predecessor to that game, Wolfenstein.

So, with all of that previous history, people were full of anticipation and excitement about the Halo 3 release date. How popular and welcome was the game? Well, before its release, 3.1 million copies were sold in advance orders and retailers thought that that was not enough.

The game took over $300 million gross in the United States in only its first week. Overall, it has sold over nine million copies worldwide and was the best-selling video game in the United States in 2007. Even the critics loved it, ranking it the seventh highest on the list of Xbox 360 all-time great games.

The Halo 3 release date, like the release date of many widely popular video games was almost like a holiday like Christmas or Easter. It leaves us with the question of what will happen in the realm of video games in the future?

A Halo 3 mod is usually thought of as any software modification that alters the game play in the very popular video game for the Xbox 360, Halo 3. But the term also includes many other modifications, such as physical changes made to the Xbox 360 console to show everybody that you are a hard-core Halo 3 fanatic.

However, before someone can make a Halo 3 mod, they must have the proper tools, together with some technical expertise and knowledge. These tools would usually includes a number of pieces of software that allow people to de-construct, edit, and reconstruct Halo 3 files. It would also involve some hardware to allow the Xbox 360 hard drive to be uploaded into a PC and the files to be restored to that hard drive.

You have to do it this way, because the Xbox 360 is not a unit on which programs can be changed. In the past, the hardware developers, in this case Microsoft, made the tools available to those who paid the licensing fee. But as time passed, especially with Halo 3 mods, the public developed several tools and techniques to accomplish what needs to be done for modification.

A Halo 3 mod also includes, as stated earlier, physical changes to the Xbox 360 console. Some people, for example, remove the case and actually carve the words ‘Halo 3′ into it. They might also accompany this by painting the console red, blue or green to match the colour of the armour of the characters in the game.

However, it’s a pretty extreme way to say to the world – I like Halo 3 – because it could cause actual damage that renders the Xbox 360 unplayable. People often display their customized Xbox 360s on photo-sharing sites such as Flickr and when they go toattend live LAN events.

One of the things that people who are interested in the world of the Halo 3 mod try to focus on is that the mods should not be created for the purpose of cheating. Modifications are fun to get a new twist on Halo 3 play or a new feel for certain levels. But if they’re used to make the game easier for one person or team, they destroy the overall game for everyone.

One website where a person can find many a Halo 3 mod is H3mod.com. The site calls itself the ‘future of Halo modding’. It seems like a good place to begin if you want to learn about a Halo 3 mod.