: For me it was the release of Halo 2. I had gotten to Gamestop at 8:00pm with
: a couple of friends and saw a few others there already. They had a little
: 10 inch tube TV, playing 4 player CTF on Blood Gulch all running off of a
: car battery. Every half hour they'd swap it with one they had in their car
: to recharge it. It was one of the funniest and most amazing things I'd
: seen at the time. Finally as time passed the line grew larger and larger
: until it stretched for what seemed like about a mile. Everyone was so
: excited to finally get their hands on this mythical game.

: Finally the doors opened and the first few people shuffled into the store. I
: was fourth in line but the first out the door with my copy. As I walked
: through the door I raised the limited edition copy I bought up into the
: air and yelled with excitement. Everyone else cheered in anticipation, it
: was just awesome. Went home and played the first few missions with my dad.
: I miss those days.

: Anyone else got a cool story from the release day of a past Halo game?

The only Halo launch I ever went to (the only videogame launch too, in fact) was for the midnight release of Halo Reach. I'd pre-ordered the legendary edition and somehow convinced my parents to let me have it as an early birthday gift, which I've managed to do yet again 7 years later with Destiny 2. Imagine that! There were so many people at the launch, it was hard to believe. It was at an EBGames in a pretty small shopping centre, in a place called Blacktown (Sydney, Australia), and it was awesome; I met so many cool people and we just talked about Halo and played Halo 3 multiplayer on the system-linked kiosks they had setup, for hours before midnight hit. They had a neat green-screen thing there too where they would take your photo, and superimpose a Noble 6 helmet over your face, which sounds really dumb now but was the coolest thing ever for 12 year old me.

I skipped school the next day to play Reach, and I don't think there was a day that went by where I didn't play it until about 3 months had passed. I met more than half of my Xbox Live friends through Reach, and I still make an effort to go back and play multiplayer every now and then, there are a surprising amount of people still playing it (probably because of its xboner backward compatibility).

Good memories.

I booted my 360 to try to find a match on Halo 3 yesterday, and there was a grand total of 204 people playing: 200 on social slayer, and 4 on lone wolves, a seemingly fitting playlist for them.