And Counting

Saturday night, while many of us were stuffing food into our faces, plenty of folks were still playing Halo 3.  At precisely 6:36pm PST, in a three minute and nineteen second game of Infection on Foundry, four players participated in Halo 3's one billionth match.

One Billion.  It's a giant number, one that's difficult to understand without the proper context.  Our first thought was to put it into perspective by comparing Halo 3's total games played with its predecessor, Halo 2, a title that we are still super proud of, and one that's topped the original Xbox LIVE Leaderboards since its launch through to present day - over four years of online gaming.

But there's a problem with that comparison.  Halo 2 has yet to achieve one billion games played.  As of right now, it's sitting pretty at 798 million total matches played.  Surprised?  We were.

Still, we wanted to find ways to help you (and us) better comprehend just what one billion games means in the grand scheme of things.

If each game of Halo 3 lasted only three minutes and nineteen seconds, mirroring the Infection game outlined above, the total amount of time played would eclipse sixty-three centuries.  For those looking for more granularity, that's roughly 630 decades, 6,300 years, or 2,300,000 days.

But admittedly, that's working from a pretty rough estimate.  No worries, we keep tabs on this sort of stuff.  We recruited our database guru, RocketMoose, to provide us with some more accurate numbers.  The data point he supplies below is a sum total of all player time spent in matchmaking.  If ten players completed a ten minute match, the database would log 100 minutes of total playtime.  This figure also does not include data from Custom or Offline matches.

Total Matchmaking Playtime: 2,023,153,340,764 seconds.

Yes, that's two Trillion seconds, or 64,109 years of playtime. 

64,000 years ago:

• Neanderthal walked the Earth.
• Modern Man had yet to set foot in Asia.
• The Battle Rifle was Hitscan.

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.

Love, Bungie.