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richardhutnik on 21 January 2009
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ymeaga1n said:

Bullshit. Either you are out of your mind or do not know the definition of hype. (Definition: http://www.answers.com/hype)

  1. Excessive publicity and the ensuing commotion: the hype surrounding the murder trial.
  2. Exaggerated or extravagant claims made especially in advertising or promotional material: “It is pure hype, a gigantic PR job” (Saturday Review).
  3. An advertising or promotional ploy: “Some restaurant owners in town are cooking up a $75,000 hype to promote New York as ‘Restaurant City, U.S.A.’” (New York).
  4. Something deliberately misleading; a deception: “[He] says that there isn't any energy crisis at all, that it's all a hype, to maintain outrageous profits for the oil companies” (Joel Oppenheimer).

I think you're mistaking anticipation with hype in Halos case. It did sell off of reviews. That's like saying Half Life sold because of hype. Halo, like HL, sould millions because it was a revolutionary acheivement in gaming. How many games nowadays take concepts halo introduced?

 

I believe we are looking at the following regarding Halo (the original) and Half-Life (the original):

1. The original Halo was slotted to be a PC FPS by Bungie that made some solid PC games, such as the Myth series, and did Marathon on the Mac, which was a noted FPS series there.  Some AWESOME graphics at the time for Halo were shown, and people got excited.  Microsoft then decided to make it a console FPS, and people who followed the title waited, and were curious to see if they could pull it off.  And Bungie did, establishing the FPS genre as viable on consoles.  Other titles, such as Call of Duty followed, and we were off to the races.

2. Half-Life is an interested study in accidental, or maybe it was intentional, use of piracy as a means of hyping up a game.  It was a well done title, but what Valve/Sierra did was was release a small set of the game, "Day one" that was like one eight of the game.  It was supposed to only go to OEMs I believe, and NOT get out in the wild.  Well, throw this down as people take it as a challenge.  Day One happened to have a bit of "have to have it" buzz about it, with a quasi-illegal feel, so it was talked about, and people wanted to try it.  I know it drove me to try it.  By the time the game came out, it became a must-have in the PC market.  And I got it.

I think an ironic part is what became of Half-Life multiplayer.  It did what no one probably predicted: Become a multiplayer powerhouse, spawning multiple genre defining FPS modes, with the top one being Counterstrike, but it did put Team Fortress on the map to.  I actually said, in one of the worst underestimations ever, "Great single player game.  But it won't amount to much multiplayer".  I traded it based on this thinking, back when you could trade in PC games and get money and store credit.

Once multiplayer took off, based upon great single player, then Half-Life became what it is.  Halo became what it is by being the first good FPS to make it to consoles, and become a killer app that was used to sell the XBox.