Publishers and game developers every where have one thing that they all despise and that most definitely is broken street dates for their products. It takes a megaton of time and hard work no matter how good or bad the game to at the very least get a game to a point where it eventually ships. Then comes a game of the up most importance like Halo 3.

We’ve all ( hopefully all) been witness to the Halo 3 marketing juggernaut flex its muscles quite frequently as of late with the culmination of it to come on September 25th and in Europe on September 26. An early leak of the game at this point would be disastrous, as in the case with Halo 2 when a French PAL version of the game was let lose on the internet right before that release. Flash forward to today, and from all accounts it has happened again. Coming from MaxConsole, this time a Norwegian game shop has broken the street date for arguably the most important game of the year for the Xbox 360.

According to Choi Wang who tipped off MaxConsole to this, a Norwegian shop that goes by the name Expert, today sold at least two copies of Halo 3. If true, and there’s no real reason to doubt it considering that it comes with a picture to boot( photoshop?), staying off the internet ( the rest of the internet, we would never spoil anything) until the 25th may be a good idea if you want to stay spoiler free. Then again the folks up at Bungie and Microsoft can’t be doing anything but steaming right about now and who can blame them if they decide to throw a pack of vicious lawyers armed with a lawsuit at the offending store for possibly ruining Halo 3 for those who would kindly not like to be spoiled for once.

[Via MaxConsole]

-William “thewilleffect” Bell-