"125 million!" an audience member shouts confidently. He's just correctly answered one of five Halo trivia questions, this one concerning Halo 2's launch-day revenues.The booming voice of the emcee confirms the response, and fires back with another question for the audience at large: "Is Halo 3 gonna break that record? Make some noise!" The crowd of 200-something erupts, seemingly indicating that these hardcore Halo fans not only want to play Halo 3, they want Microsoft and Bungie to make loads and loads of cash.

It was all fairly surreal, sitting in San Francisco's Metreon IMAX theater among the throng of Halo 3 fanatics last night at one of two Halo 3 First to Play events. The Pontiac-sponsored hype-cooker gave a couple hundred Halo 3 fans a first look at the campaign and creative Forge mode, as well as some hands-on time in an 8-person, 6-minute slayer match--with one ballsy player's tea-bagging exploits fully IMAXed and surround sounded for others to watch and inevitably offer the Halo-trademarked brand of nonconstructive criticism.

A few more trivia questions and a couple make-some-noise requests later, the emcee revealed everyone who answered a question correctly would receive a new Halo 3 edition Xbox 360. And apparently someone was getting a new car? The emcee was stoking the flames of an already unfathomable concentration of marketing hype within this group of die-hard fans, 90% of whom had already preordered the game. It was the combined "they-could-give-us-fucking-anything-right now" fervor of an Oprah audience with the near-rapturous congregation of a mega-church, greeting the emcee's pastor-like affirmations of Halo 3's sovereignty with "fuck yeahs" rather than "amens." And it made the Halo 3 tagline of "Believe" all the more fitting--a few devoted faithful made a pilgrimage from cities as far as Atlanta to see the game.

After the warmup, Bungie's multiplayer producer Joseph Tung and youthful multiplayer designer Lars Bakken took over, playing through the campaign's third mission in two-player co-op. The two Warthogged through the level on the iconic Halo vehicle, gloriously smashing into Jackals and even larger Brutes along the way. The pair also showed off the pure testosterone of the Brute Chopper, an oversized single-wheeled mechanical fury. It all looked like fun, but it still all looked like Halo, which is why the most interesting part of the demonstration came after the campaign.

Upon finishing the mission, Bakken went into the Save Films feature, which sports a lobby just like the multiplayer modes for getting together and sharing gameplay movies. The level Bakken and Tung had played was automatically recorded as a video, and Bakken demonstrated the feature's various enhancements. Most impressive was the ability to detach the camera from your character and move it anywhere through the level--either during playback or while the movie is paused for a Matrix-like 360-degree freeze frame effect. Bakken detached the camera and moved it ahead of the rambling Warthog in cinematic fashion, freezing and rotating at pivotal moments--like the metal-meets-exoskeleton collision from a pair of Jackals being simultaneously gunned down and rammed by the Bungie duo.

Bakken actually took a snapshot of the unfortunate aliens' deaths with one button press, uploading it to his Bungie.net account in 1080p. Halo 3 players will get 25MB of storage on Bungie's servers for free, which should be enough for all kinds of files unless players focus on storing mainly videos and images. "Your average 10-minute game is probably going to be about 8 megs, so it's not bad at all," Bakken told me later. "If you take a clip of that, it's not going to be nearly as big. It could be like 500K or something like that." Of course, the Bungie.net servers are only for sharing, and players can store almost as many full videos as they want on their hard drives.

The video feature seemed extremely customizable and will certainly offer ridiculous possibilities to creative types for machinima purposes, but isn't really an extension of the gameplay--which is where the Forge mode fits in. Bakken showed a bit of this in-game creative tool for customizing maps and inventing everything from new gametypes to custom weapons. You can actually play this mode like a multiplayer match, as you have full control over your character--or you can detach and fly around as a monitor, though you're still destructible in this form. You can place new objects or move existing ones into a map with ease, and Bakken proceeded to set up a stack of 20 volatile fusion coils and smack them with the powerful gravity hammer, launching his dead Spartan avatar upward.

Go to the next page for more on Forge mode and multiplayer insights from Bungie multiplayer guru Lars Bakken.