Halo 3 Racks Up £150 Million Worldwide

Halo 3 has racked up a not-too-shabby $300 million (£147.36 million) in sales worldwide, making it what Microsoft calls “the fastest-selling video game ever”.

In fact, Microsoft tells us that “Halo 3 has officially become a global phenomenon”. Officially! So the Global Phenomenon Board has obviously got together to put its stamp on the matter, putting it alongside Harry Potter, The Beatles, Jesus and Tamagotchis.

Microsoft also tells us that the game's launch doubled weekly 360 hardware sales compared to the weekly average before launch, matching UK figures that SPOnG brought you yesterday.

We've also been regaled with some pretty impressive online statistics. 3.6 million hours of online gameplay were racked up in the game's first day of release alone, with the figure climbing to 40 million by the end of the game's first week. That, if you were wondering, is the equivalent to 4,500 years of play. That time (not a million miles from the length of recorded history^†) was shared among 2.7 million gamers. SPOnG did the maths, and that gives us an average of 14.8 hours per gamer.

Players have also unlocked 30,000 achievements playing the game, while Xbox Live Gold memberships have seen a boost since launch.

Time for a quick round-up, SPOnG reckons, of just how super-spectacularly well Halo 3 has done since launch. Firstly, it became the “biggest entertainment launch in history”, beating the likes of Spider-Man 3 (the film) and Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows after racking up $170 million (£83.4 million) over its first 24 hours of sale in the US. Yes, that's right, doing that in the States alone does qualify you for “biggest entertainment launch in history”... apparently.

It went on to become the second “fastest” (SPOnG's not convinced that 'sold the most in its first week' is the same as 'fastest') selling game ever in the UK.

It also produced a spot of awe when it managed to top the Japanese charts, beating a Pokemon game, of all things.

Then, yesterday, we learned how Halo 3 took £17 million in the UK during its first sales week.

Congratulations, Microsoft! Can we stop hearing about this now so we can get on with playing the damn thing? You can read SPOnG's full Halo 3 review here.

^{†There is of course good reason to believe that history started a long time before that... Thank You.}