292 GAME stores open midnight tonight for Halo 4 launch

292 GAME stores up and down the land open at midnight tonight to sell Halo 4.

The flagship launch is at GAME Stratford (GAME Oxford Street is no more).

For midnight launches GAME stores open their doors around 11.45pm, but some may open earlier to help with trade-ins. Tills will be open from midnight, though. Stores will generally close around an hour later, but this all depends on customer demand.

Meanwhile, at 7.45pm, some kind of stunt at the River Thames will be performed from the Greenwich Peninsular to Tower Bridge. It'll be an “amazing spectacle” apparently, and fans are advised to arrive at Butler's Wharf around 7.30pm. If you show a photo of the stunt on your phone at GAME Stratford you may win some Halo merchandise.

GAME is laying on a Halo bus to shift the first 50 fans from Thames Walkway at 9pm to the Stratford shop. There will be a life-size replica of a Warthog and a gaming pod area. 343 boss Kiki Wolfkill will be there to sign copies of the game.

And finally someone from the queue will get a limited edition Halo 4 Xbox 360 and a Samsung Notebook 5 Series.

Microsoft has high hopes for Xbox 360 exclusive Halo 4, which cost more to make than any Microsoft game. It expects to add considerably to the 46 million Halo games that have been sold worldwide since the first game, Halo: Combat Evolved, launched on the Xbox in 2001. The last game in the series, Halo: Reach, made more than $200 million in sales in the US and Europe in the first 24 hours of release - a figure that eclipsed all previous 2010 US entertainment launches, including the three-day opening weekends of Iron Man 2, Alice in Wonderland and Toy Story 3.