One billion Halo 3 games played online

There are milestones, and then there's this news: Bungie has announced that this weekend it served its one billionth match in the fantastically popular Halo 3 video game.

That's a staggering figure, and it dwarfs even Halo 3's predecessor, Halo 2, which to date has served only 798 million online matches after four years running. (The figure also doesn't include the single-player part of the game.)

The amount of time collectively spent playing the game is equally insane. Figuring in the total time spent per match and the number of players per match gets you a total amount of playtime over two trillion seconds -- or 64,109 years spent in the game. As Bungie notes, 64,000 years ago, Neanderthal man was still roaming the earth, blissfully unaware that Halo 1 would soon be coming out, much less Halo 3.

I wish I could put that in perspective, but few other games have reported time spent playing online. There's one juggernaut, though, that handily eclipses even the most popular console games, and that's World of Warcraft. If my math and research is right, there are about 7.6 million WoW players who spend an average of 718 minutes per week playing the game. That's 327 billion seconds in the WoW universe, weekly -- or enough collective time spent in the game world to overtake Halo 3's lifetime record... in just a month and a half.

Sorry Master Chief, you may be the champ of first-person shooters, but no one can go up against the Horde and come out alive.