Many expected it, and now it seems it’s true—a 2 minute, extended version of the season 3 trailer will be available via HBO On Demand on March 4th… and so shall almost certainly be airing on HBO proper on Sunday evening, probably somewhere in relation to Girls.

Guess it’s just as well I hadn’t had time to screencap it, I suppose. I’ll just screencap the extended version.

I wonder what the extended trailer will show us that we haven’t seen yet? Anything fans are hoping to get a glimpse of that they haven’t yet seen?

Been a busy week for us here at Westeros.org, with a trip taking me out of commission for a couple of days… but I did pick up some interesting information along the way. And now that it’s out, we may as well share it as well: titles for most of the episodes for season 3.

• “Valar Dohaeris” (pairing nicely with last season’s finale)
• “Dark Wings, Dark Words”
• “Walk of Punishment”
• “And Now His Watch is Ended”
• “Kissed by Fire”
• Still untitled
• “The Bear and the Maiden Fair”
• Still untitled
• “The Rains of Castamere”
• “Mhysa”

We’ll be adding these to our Episode guide once we dig our way out from under mail and screencapping and manuscripts everything else we’re up to at the moment!

And here it is, folks, what many have been waiting for:

What’d you think?

Normally we’d screencap this right off, but as it’s almost 6:30AM, that’ll have to wait. But definitely some things to digest. Two notable things we’ll note:

Over at Entertainment Weekly, James Hibberd has the scoop with the exclusive premiere of the season 3 poster, featuring a silhouette of one of Daenerys Targaryen’s young dragons in flight. An interesting image to choose from. As Hibberd notes, the first season was Ned Stark on the Iron Throne, the second was a hand grasping a crown. These both refer to the central storylines of the previous two seasons, with Ned in King’s Landing as Hand and the War of the Five Kings. A shift to Dany suggests they may be emphasizing her storyline this year.

Well, this is a surprise: the season 3 trailer for Game of Thrones will get its world premiere on Jimmy Kimmel Live this Friday, with it going up on Youtube immediately after the East Coast airing. Here’s the press release, straight from HBO:

Disruptor Beam has now rolled out their Facebook social strategy game, Game of Thrones: Ascent as part of an open beta. We took part a bit in the closed beta, and though social games aren’t usually our thing, this one did a good job of capturing the atmosphere of A Song of Ice and Fire within the framework of social game mechanics. Here’s the official trailer for the game:

It sounds like the Union Square Bluray launch event was a great success, with many fans turning up to share the experience that HBO put on with the help of Best Buy and Campfire!

See below for a few photos from the event, as well as reports from the good folks at the UNSpoiled! Podcast and fellow early entry winner Christine Cemelli:

HBO has just announced a traveling exhibit that will start in March and appear in five different countries from March to June. It sounds like it’s going to feature some pretty remarkable things. Locations include Toronto, New York City, Sao Paulo, Amsterdam, and Belfast, Full details below:

The official Making Game of Thrones production blog has a post detailing the ending of season 3 filming late last year in Iceland. The environment they were in sounds rather amazing:

As to what they were filming? Despite it being at the very end of the shoot, it’s an opening scene from the first episode, directed by Dan Minahan. Some spoilerish details follow:

HBO and Best Buy have partnered together for a special launch event at Best Buy’s Union Square store in New York City for the Game of Thrones: Complete Second Season Blu-ray and DVD sets (Pre-order: US Bluray, US DVD, UK Bluray, UK DVD), and it sounds like they’ve some exciting plans in store. Read on to learn just what’s going on… and how you can win a chance to get early access to the event!

February 19 sees the release of the Game of Thrones Complete Second Season setin the US, and March 4th should see it out in the UK and more widely in Europe (Pre-order: US Bluray, US DVD, UK Bluray, UK DVD).

For those anticipating it, we’ve shared clips and details, but thanks to HBO, we’ve had the opportunity to get an early review copy. In brief, it lives up to the production values of the previous season, and in some places (such as the Histories, which I consider my personal favorite extra) exceeds them. The Blu-ray set is a showcase of the show’s very high production values, revealing it in the full glory of 1080p.

Courtesy of HBO, it looks like George R.R. Martin has taken the black:

Earlier in the month, we shared the news that Factory Entertainment had secured a license to produce collectibles along the lines of plush animals, throw pillows, prop replicas, and sculptural miniatures. Now, we have our first glimpse at some of their products, courtesy of Action Figure Times. In this gallery focused on Factory Entertianment’s display at Toy Fair 2013, we have two images showing Game of Thrones products.

The first image features some soft dragon eggs and a couple of house throw pillows, while the second image displays a few rather cute plush direwolves (notice Ghost with the red eyes), as well as a Targaryen throw pillow which suggests they’ll all features the house motto as well as the sigil.

Factory Entertainment expects to start releasing products in Summer 2013.

Narrated by Aidan Gillen as Littlefinger, this promotional video for season 3 of Game of Thrones certainly looks and sounds ominous:

What do you think of it?

Back in October, we stumbled across the fact that young actor Dean-Charles Chapman had a role in season 3 of Game of Thrones, as revealed by his talent agency. We did some digging, got some fairly solid leads as to who he might be playing, and we dutifully asked for confirmation. We were informed that that wasn’t possible, so we let it lie and, I admit, rather forgot about it. Since his casting has been more widely publicized, we’ll share what we learned back then: