Champaign police cruised by Green Street, looking for signs of disorderliness, as long lines of excited college-age students milled around the area. This was not your typical Saturday night bar scene, however – it was Midnight Madness for Halo 2, the sequel to the immensely popular X-Box game Halo: Combat Evolved.

“People were pumped,” said Brady An, store manager for EB Games, who while selling Halo 2, was also taking photos of the long line. “There was definite excitement in the air – the line stretched around the corner from (Follett’s Bookstore). Some people had started lining up at least four hours before.”

And it was not just college-age men, An said – there were “definitely the hard-core females” as well as “moms” and “people over the age of 35” that were lined up at midnight when the store started to sell the game.

Alex Heyen, freshman in LAS, and his suitemate Michael Hettinger, freshman in engineering, did not attend Midnight Madness. Instead, they said they would wait to buy the game when there were less crowds.

“I’m definitely going to play an hour or two every day,” Heyen said.

Developed by Bungie Studios and published by Microsoft Game Studios, Halo 2 continues the Halo: Combat Evolved story. The original Halo is set in 2552, with overpopulation causing humans to colonize other planets. However, humanity is battling a race of fanatically religious aliens known as the Covenant, bent on destroying humankind – which they refer to as “an affront to the gods.” A group of cyborg super-soldiers are created to board a Covenant ship and destroy the Covenant home world. However, with the destruction of the planet where the cyborgs are created, the remaining few soldiers escape on a ship called Pillar of Autumn and make a jump into deep space in an effort to lead the Covenant away from Earth. Halo 2 continues that story, with the Covenant actually having found the Earth and having destroyed a couple of cities and the player continuing in the role of “Master Chief,” one of the few remaining cyborg soldiers of his kind.

“The ending pissed me off,” Hettinger said. “It ends in a cliffhanger – Bungie is holding out for Halo 3.”

Heyen added that he felt it was obvious that Bungie Studios was holding up the game for the purposes of making more money. But when asked if he would buy Halo 3, the answer was an emphatic “yeah.”

Since the trailers for Halo 2 were released in May, the buildup to the release for the game has been intensive. According to Associated Press reports, Microsoft said it had 1.5 million copies pre-ordered and predicted first-day sales of more than $100 million.

According to An, one third of all pre-ordered Halo 2 copies at EB Games have been picked up. An said sales of paraphernalia and equipment related to the game, such as X-Box consoles, game strategy guides and headgear have also spiked.