Microsoft’s Halo 3 has racked up $300 million in sales in its first week – no small accomplishment for a company that has yet to put out a decent Media Player after eleven tries. Maybe it’s because all of the good ideas contained in Halo, as well as the code, came from outside contractors?  I don’t know whether that’s true or not, but I’d be surprised if any programmers on Microsoft’s permanent payroll had a hand in creating something that works as flawlessly as Halo.

On the other hand, what choice did they have? The game business is so ruthlessly competitive that even a small misstep can cost a company hundreds of millions of dollars in lost profits.  Too bad there’s almost no competition in the market for PC operating systems, since that might have forced Microsoft to put out a product comparable in quality to Halo.

I can attest to Halo’s potent appeal, since my 15-year-old has been practically living in the basement since the game was released at midnight on September 25.  That being a school night, in the pouring rain I took his spot in a queue that wound its way through the parking lot of a local videogame emporium. My son had left a downpayment more than a year earlier, so there was no waiting till morning. Came the weekend, he pulled back-to-back all-nighters before crashing into a coma-like sleep from which he did not awaken until late Sunday afternoon. His life has since returned to normal only because I put a lock on the Xbox the other night.

Crude But Engrossing

I experienced the addictive power of videogames myself in the late 1960s, playing “Space Wars” for the first time with some friends in a student lab at MIT.  The game was crude even compared to Donkey Kong and Super Mario, let alone Halo, but it was enthralling nonetheless. The individual consoles had just four functions:  rocket ship left, rocket ship right, accelerate, and fire missiles. We started playing around 10 p.m., but it felt like we’d only been at it for a few hours when the sun came up.

One of these days they’re going to release an X-rated, 3D videogame that will simulate sex with strangers and starlets so realistically that, even without bringing our sense of touch into play, it will prevent any paying work from getting done.  Of course, the Marxists will tell us they saw it coming.