I have been trying to ignore the Halo 3 coverage everywhere online as I don't have an Xbox 360 and the hype has started to make me want one (even though my bank account is at -$44.63). But this type of stuff is hard to ignore when you go to a tech school and campus was noticeably void the morning after the Halo 3 launch. The same thing happened when Halo 2 came out my freshman year, not to mention the Ethernet cables strung through the dorm hall as the old dorm had a weird network topology where only a few LAN devices could see each other.
I was close to getting through the week without needing to write about Halo 3, and then I saw the New York Times' Halo 3 article. An NYT reporter quoted two Georgia Tech students waiting in the Halo 3 line... this can't be good:
In Atlanta, an arc of young men lined a balcony at Lenox Square, the city's biggest shopping mall, as they awaited the game's debut at a GameStop store. Ari Velazquez and Dan Gibson, roommates at the Georgia Institute of Technology, said they had converted their apartment into a sort of high-tech video game cave, sealing windows with blankets and cardboard and stocking up on ramen noodles, chips and white-cheddar popcorn.
"We expect that, like, no one's going to go to class tomorrow, and the teachers are going to know," said Mr. Gibson, 20.
"We've been in Internet seclusion for like weeks," to avoid any leaks about the game's plot, Mr. Gibson said. Mr. Velazquez gestured toward the balcony in the Atlanta mall and added, "If I found out the ending of the game right now, you're going to have to hold me back from jumping."
Did I mention that those two students are in my Computational Media major, which is unfortunately referred to as the "gaming" major by those outside of our loop. There you have it, Georgia Tech really is as geeky as you've heard.