E3: Halo 3 Unveiled - Trailer Included

Bungie has officially revealed the worst kept secret in gaming history. Halo 3 has been announced while an HD trailer has also surfaced on XBox Live Marketplace. Halo 3 will be released for Microsoft's Xbox 360 in 2007. To download the E3 2006 Halo 3 trailer follow the download tab above.

The game was revealed to the world at the Microsoft press conference at Grauman's Chinese Theater, in Hollywood, CA. The impressive footage of the trailer is just the tip of the iceberg, Bungie informs us, We won't ruin the content of our short presentation by describing it frame by frame, but we will note that everything you're seeing here is being rendered in real-time on the Xbox 360, using the current version of our Halo 3 game engine. The HDR lighting, self-shadowing, GPU-run particle system and many other effects should make it intact (and more) to our final game.

CJ Cowan, Bungie's director of cinematics discussed one of the most startling moments in the trailer, the return of Cortana, Given the variety of character and story arcs at the end of Halo 2, we wanted to boil down our announcement to a few key threads. Cortana and the Chief being a galaxy apart is a situation we haven't seen before, and is something that is a powerful component to Halo 3. We are using her transmissions in the demo to give the viewer a few subtle clues to her situation and state of mind, without revealing any specifics we want to save for the game itself.

The Cortana reveal is the first evidence that this trailer might be for Halo 3, but the game's main protagonist is the item that seals that deal. CJ explains, It is the Chief, back on a devastated and Covenant controlled Earth, standing over the excavation of a structure buried in the crust of our own planet that is the meat of our demo.

The questions raised by these images, and the feeling that our assumptions about the Halo universe are being challenged this late in the story is what I am personally most excited about leaving with our fans. That's the type of thing that builds anticipation even more for the payoff to this trilogy we are preparing.