ITWire

File under strange but true: strange that anyone is actually keeping count of such things, and strange that the number is so high. But those numbers not only speak for themselves, they also speak for just how popular the Halo franchise has become.

The numbers? Oh yes. on June 21st the estimated population of Planet Earth, as measured by the online population clock which is as good a bit of guessing as any other, was a rather impressive 6,705,066,871. Meanwhile, at the same time says Oh Gizmo the official Bungie website which tracks such things was reporting 6,719,996,560 enemies as having been fragged to hell and back.

If, like my son and all his school mates, you are totally obsessed with all things Halo 3 then you have probably already paid a visit to the Bungie shrine. If not, go take a look anyway and get an insight into the mind of a hard core online gamer.

As I write I can see that the Enemy KIA statistic has already risen to 6,752,229,647. Or put another way an increase of an average of nearly 11 million 'deaths' every day.

Which is not too surprising when you scroll down to the player numbers and realise that in the middle of a weekday afternoon here in the UK, there are somehow 26,395 people playing Halo 3 online right now. 

Expect that figure to shoot unbelievably skywards when the school bell rings, after work and of a weekend.

Thankfully this is not a real battle campaign, and sorry to disappoint the handle of hard core Halo fans who take things a little too seriously and think it is, because the friendly kills figure is rather worrying.

There must either be a lot of newbies taking to the online servers, or some very twisted people out there: 1,178,060,904 friendly troops killed in action in total. 265,601 today alone!