Some of the statistics that we hear these days are funny, and we often wonder who takes the time necessary to come up with these numbers. Bungie has a new number that surely will leave some scratching their heads.

On Saturday, February 28th at 6:36 PST, the one billionth match took place online for Halo 3. Yes, that’s right: Halo 3 has achieved the status of over one billion matches served. The match only had four players in it and it lasted a total of 3 minutes and 19 seconds on the Foundry map, playing the Infection game mode.

What might be a bit more amazing is that if you added up all of the time spent playing Halo 3 online by gamers, it would equal a bit over 64 years; and that does not even count all of the custom and offline games that players have played. Of course, it comes as little surprise that the time spent playing Halo 3 has beat the previously released Halo 2, which has only been able to achieve a little over 798+ million matches so far.

To Halo 3’s credit, it has no equal as far as online game play on Xbox Live. The next closest game as far as total online game play is Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. While we don’t know the exact numbers for the total amount of online game play, developer Infinity Wars has said that the title has over 10 million unique online players.

Sounds like a carnage to us, but only you can be the judge whether or not all of this time was time wasted. It really is an amazing number, if you think about it, and it does show how far online gaming has come.