Master Chief Suffers At The Hands of Local Government

In the last few months London has seen the Tour De France come through (around a million spectators), had 35,000+ cyclists storm around the closed-off streets, handled 300,000+ spectators for the annual London Marathon, dealt with 25,000 runners for the London 10k, allowed tens of thousands of concert goers to see Prince at the O2, seen 70,000+ people attend games at Twickenham and the new Wembley and dealt with any number of major film red carpet premieres and even a midnight launch event for the latest Harry Potter where fans queued for hours or days to get their hands on the much-awaited book  …

… and cancelled all of the launch events planned in Westminster for Halo 3.  Rolling on from that, none of the major chains (Game, HMV, Virgin etc) will be hosting any midnight openings for those people who want to get their hands on the game a few hours early.  Apparently the local government policy wonks are worried about just how many people might turn out.  Maybe all ten million Xbox 360 owners are coming to London for the day, although launch night in New York indicates that’s not so – and they were allowed to stay up until midnight all without adult supervision,  Maybe Westminster figure a Covenant drop ship will descend and blast everyone away and they wanted to avoid sweeping up the mess the next day.

With the iphone launch just a few weeks away I wonder if those learned public servants in Westminster Council will adopt the same mind-bogglingly daft attitude. The spell checker in Windows Live thought I meant “bunglingly” there – that’s probably more accurate. 

I can’t imagine that there are more than a few hundred, maybe a thousand, people that would show up for such an event – fewer still for the iphone launch I suspect.   After all, they had so few people turn up for the UK PS3 launch that they were able to give them all LCD widescreen TVs.