Microsoft confirms Halo 4 with teaser trailer

Microsoft game chief Don Mattrick closed the company’s E3 press conference today with a video of scenes from Halo 4, the first in a new trilogy of the popular Halo franchise starring Master Chief and Cortana.

Fans roared with applause as soon as they saw that a new Halo game was being announced at Microsoft’s E3 press conference in Los Angeles. The game series has sold tens of millions of copies for Microsoft and was the flagship game that made the Xbox take off at its initial launch in 2001. Now, with a new series coming, Microsoft stands to keep generating billions of dollars from its Halo franchise.

In the meantime, the original developer of the series, Bungie, has moved on to create something new with publisher Activision Blizzard on that and has passed the Halo torch on to Microsoft itself.

The trailer showed that Master Chief actually survived in the spaceship wreckage at the end of Halo 3 (sorry to spoil that). Cortana, the artificial intelligence companion to the Spartan super soldier, tells Master Chief to wake up. He manages to do so just as the vacuum of space sucks him away from the ship. He manages to hang on. The rest of the trailer showed lots of good old-fashioned Halo combat.

This game is most likely being developed by Microsoft’s new internal studio, 343 Industries, headed by Bungie veteran Frank O’Connor. Don Mattrick, head of Microsoft’s game division, said the game will debut around holiday 2012.

We’ll be exploring the most disruptive game technologies and business models at our third annual GamesBeat 2011 conference, on July 12-13 at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco. It will focus on the disruptive trends in the mobile games market. GamesBeat is co-located with our MobileBeat 2011 conference this year. To register, click on this link. Sponsors can message us at sponsors@venturebeat.com. To participate in our Who’s Got Game? contest for the best game startup, click on this link.