The reach of Halo.

Bungie has compiled some pretty interesting stats on the first week of gameplay for their blockbuster swan song Halo: Reach, and the numbers are staggering. According to their online stat trackers, by 1:30 pm on launch day (9/14) the game had already registered more users online than the entire first week of Halo 3's launch. That may also be due to the fact that there are simply much more Xbox360 owners today than there were when Halo 3 was released back in September '07, but impressive nonetheless.

On top of that, of the 70 million + games that have been played in that week, Bungie claims that over 5,901 man-years have been spent playing Reach online.
That's over 51 million hours!
In one week!

"Halo: Reach...into your wallet"

Apparently the people at Bungie do very detailed tracking of their games, compiling data as trivial as the amount of shots fired, among other things, and a friend of mine who picked the game up at a midnight launch told me that same afternoon that he and his brother had actually beaten the game that morning......on legendary mode (that's hard mode for everybody else), so given the intense fanaticism surrounding the game I'm not entirely surprised.

But, damn...... !