Halo 3 achieves 64 thousand years of online play

64 thousand years ago Neanderthals were alive, yet that's the amount of time Halo 3 players have accumulated in online play.

Last weekend the one billionth Halo 3 match was played. Now that's quite a feat, which we can put into further context by comparing it to Halo 2.

Bungie's previous hit title has enjoyed four years of online gaming, but surprisingly it hasn't even achieved one billion games played. Halo 2 is sitting at around 800 million.

Bungie try to comprehend the massive achievement by calculating the amount of time one billion matches equate to. If each game averages 3 minutes and 19 seconds (as in Bungie.net's example) the amount of time played would amount to 6,300 years.

However, Bungie wasn't happy with that guesstimate. They employed their database guru to track down an accurate statistic for the total number of players spent in matchmaking - i.e. if ten players complete a ten minute match, that's 100 minutes.

So, taking this into account, the total figure logged in the Halo 3 database was two-trillion seconds, or 64,109 years of playtime.

Now if we were to travel back 64,000 years we'd find Neanderthals roaming the earth. And as Bungie points out, "Modern Man had yet to set foot in Asia."

Bungie send thanks to their fans, further teasing that there's more to come for the game:

"We couldn't have done it without you, our fans. Literally. Thanks a billion for all the good games and the continued community support. We're in awe of the success Halo 3 has been met with, but we're not done yet. Stick around and stay tuned, there's definitely more to come."