Halo Wars Demo Crushes Xbox Live Download Records

Over 2 million users tried out Ensemble's Halo RTS in just five days.

There's something about Halo games that seemingly requires them to shatter at least one major record during their retail lifespan. Halo Wars isn't even be out yet, but that hasn't stopped it from making a little videogame history of its own; Microsoft announced today that the demo for Ensemble's Halo RTS was downloaded by an unprecedented 2-million-plus Xbox Live Gold members during its first five days of availability.

For a little perspective, the recent Resident Evil 5 demo reached an impressive 1.8 million downloads following its first week on the Xbox Live Marketplace, while -- just over two years ago -- Capcom boasted that their single-player and multiplayer demos for Lost Planet had been downloaded a combined 1 million times during the several months that they were available.

Pretty impressive figures for a console RTS, if you ask us. We'll see what percentage of those downloads translate to sales when the full game comes out Tuesday, March 3.