Inside Halo's Secret Lab

There are other Bungie products in the works, including a super-secret non-Halo game still in the prototype phase and a new Halo interactive series created by Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson, a fan. "He doesn't even want to call it a game," Jarrard says. And Halo 2 remains one of the most popular games in Major League Gaming (the best player, Tom "Tsquared" Taylor, takes in $250,000 a year in sponsorships). "We want to make it a televised sport," says O'Connor, quickly adding, "Let's be honest, it's a game, not a sport, like snooker or poker. But like those games, it takes skill. You could cut to commentators, show replays in slow motion. I doubt it'll be on Monday night on ABC anytime soon. But a football game doesn't have explosions, or trucks flipping over, or tanks blowing spaceships out of the sky."

Despite years of focus groups and testing sessions, auditing every conceivable aspect of gameplay, the Bungie team admits that what makes a game work can be impossible to predict. "There's this magic thing that happens a month before we ship," says Griesemer. "It's terrifying when your boss is like" -- he pounds his fist -- " 'When is the game going to be fun?!' The designer can always see that it is going to be fun. But fun is the last thing to come in. It's like, 'You have to take my word for it.' "

Later that evening, in downtown Seattle, 800 or so guys (and a negligible minority of women) form a line at the site of the 1962 World's Fair. The fair's most famous artifact, the Space Needle, designed in the Tomorrowland fashion of the era to resemble a flying saucer, seems to hover above the crowd. But the draw, tonight, is the former "Spacearium," now an IMAX theater, where the group will be treated to a sneak peek at Halo 3.

Leaks about the new game have been as closely guarded as the ending of the final Harry Potter novel, so for hard-core fans, tonight's preview is a very big deal. O'Connor also handles outreach online, and is widely known within the fan community as "Frankie." He announced the IMAX preview just one day earlier on Bungie's Web site. Fans had started to line up outside the theater by ten the following morning, for an event that would not begin for another twelve hours. When the doors finally open, a river of dudes courses into the complex. T-shirts -- BEEN THERE, WRECKED THAT, the Statue of Liberty holding a pistol instead of a torch -- are pretty much the fashion standard; one fan totes a torn-open, half-empty twelve-pack of Halo 3 Mountain Dew like a briefcase. As they file into the theater, a slight locker-room funk settles over the room, along with a sense of excitement that would precede a rock concert (or, for this crowd, a group appearance by the cast of Heroes).

O'Connor soon emerges with a microphone and begins to play a heretofore unseen level of Halo 3, in which Master Chief maneuvers through a series of tunnels to emerge into a beautifully rendered meadow. The crowd roars when Master Chief races around the landscape in a jeep, when his jeep flips over and crashes in spectacular fashion, when he incinerates another player with a flamethrower. (To be fair, it's a pretty easy crowd: They also whoop when O'Connor goes to the game's menu page and changes one of the playing options.) Later, O'Connor asks, "Anyone want to see a Spartan laser kill a Warthog at point-blank?" The answer is unanimous, and extremely loud.