Via Twitter, Infinity Ward's Robert Bowling just mentioned that Modern Warfare 2 gamers have logged more than 1.75 billion hours in the game, just on Xbox Live. That's nearly 200,000 years. Other fun equivalences on the jump.


Two Hundred Thousand Years is Equal To:

• The combined lifespan of everyone living in Hettinger Co., North Dakota (population 2,564, 2006 Census estimates), assuming an average life expectancy of 78 years. So, take an entire county out in the middle of nowhere, hook them up to an Xbox 360 and have them do nothing but play this game from birth to death, that's how much gaming has been done.


Two Hundred Thousand Years Ago:

• Was the Middle Paleolithic Era, and the earliest evidence of behavioral modernity - i.e. Neanderthals painting cave walls and burying their dead. So the combined playtime on this game would be older than even basic civilized behavior. Which is, frankly, not surprising.







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Two Hundred Thousand Light Years Is:

• Roughly twice the diameter of the Milky Way. If an alien on Planet Zantrar 5 on the opposite side of the galaxy hosted a match over a connection traveling at the speed of light, you could fit the entire Xbox Live multiplayer history of this game within the lag, twice.


You could also grow 73,000 meters of fingernails in that span, and Los Angeles would move north by about six miles.