musical performance by the band The Killers. The Xbox 360 was also featured on the cover of TIME Magazine's May 23, 2005 issue with an article written by Lev Grossman. The cover shows Microsoft CEO Bill Gates holding up one of the units. In the article he says "It's perfect... The day Sony launches (PlayStation 3), and they walk right into Halo 3." Read more at wikiquote. Microsoft executive Robbie Bach later clarified this statement, saying "Philosophically the point Bill was trying to make is that we're not just going to ship and not have great stuff coming up." Gates himself later clarified that "Halo 3 will ship when Bungie is ready." Microsoft chose a November 2005 release date not because they wanted to be first to market but because they thought Sony would ship their PlayStation 3 at that point. The system, along with some playable games, was shown off at E3 2005. The demos were running on "Xbox 360 Alpha Development Kits" which were Apple PowerMac G5s, chosen due to the PowerPC processor architecture that the machine shares with the Xbox 360. Microsoft claims that most of the games were running at 25–30% of full capacity because they were not running on actual systems. Release dates and pricing Microsoft first publicized the initial prices and configurations for the Xbox 360 on August 18, 2005 at the Games Convention in Leipzig, Germany. Titles Eighteen launch titles were available for customers in the United States, Canada and Puerto Rico on November 22, 2005. The European countries had fifteen titles available for the launch date of December 2, 2005. Japanese customers, however, only had seven titles to choose from by the time the Xbox 360 was released on December 10, 2005. This discrepancy is partially accounted for by the time needed to localize the games. In North America, the best-selling title was Call of Duty 2, which had an attach rate of 77%, followed by Madden NFL 06 and Need for Speed Most Wanted. The most successful first-party title was Perfect Dark Zero. In Japan, the most successful titles were Ridge Racer 6 (29,891 copies), Perfect Dark Zero (14,897 copies), and Need for Speed Most Wanted (6,842 copies). Sales by region North America Prelaunch reports assumed that Microsoft would intentionally restrict supply although there is nothing to support this and Microsoft has said they released all units into supply chains as