I’ve played a game or two with Louis Wu before, and he seems like a really nice guy.  I am, however, rather pissed off at him and his legions of fanboys today, because they attacked a bunch of Italian shop workers and accused them of possibly “Leaking” Halo 3 information.  Dorks.  One of the HBO fanboy dorks went net surfing and found this pic on some Italian Gaming forum and immediately reported it to Wu, who put it on his front page and posted this statement:

When Shipping Departments Screw Up

nashhousewares found a thread on an Italian forum with some pictures that, if they’re what they look like, do NOT bode well for keeping Halo 3 secrets until launch day. We’re looking into this – but if it turns out to be what it looks like, I’m thinking we’ll probably close the forum down for 3 weeks. Starting… really soon. Stay tuned.

“We’re looking into this”.  Which means he went running to his buddies at Bungie, who then went running to Microsoft Game Studios, who then probably got these poor fucks in a lot of trouble for posing in some innocent picture.  Because as it turns out, those are simply the empty boxes they are going to use for display purposes around the store. 

I went back to the Italian site where this pic was originally posted, and the pic was removed with this message:

means that these guys not only got falsely accused of being, as one   HBO regular called them, “Italian Pirates”, had their faces and gamertags plastered all over the internet, and got investigated by Microsoft, they also had their fucking server crash from all the HBO dorks hitting them up.

Mama Mia!