Over one billion online games of Halo 3 have been played so far, say developers Bungie. Now that is how you spell ‘milestone’.

Breaking that down a little further it seems that a four-player game of Infection on Foundry lasting just three minutes and 19 seconds was the match that tipped the clock over the billion mark. Mining even deeper, and using the aforementioned match as a conservative basis, that equates to roughly 6,300 years of gameplay. Er, wow.

Needless to say this thrashes Halo 2’s record of 798 million hours. However, Bungie’s stat-master, RocketMoose, reckons he can go further, totalling up all the time spent in Matchmaking to come up with a frankly mind-boggling two trillion seconds of playtime - 64,000 years or thereabouts - and that doesn’t include data from offline or custom matches!

RocketMoose’s calculations might be pushing credibility just a bit, but somewhere between a billion games and 64 millennia of gameplay lies truth, and it’s certainly a lot however it’s measured. And the billion game benchmark looks set to be blasted apart since, as Bungie threatens/promises, we should “Stick around and stay tuned, there's definitely more to come.” . Oooh…