Bungie has released data showing that players who have bought Halo 3, the latest game in the series featuring Master Chief, released exclusively for the Xbox 360, have played more than 1 billion online matches since the game was released, sometime in September 2007, less than 15 months ago.

Bungie says that the billionth match took place on February 20, 2009 at 6:36 on Pacific Standard Time. It was a four player contest that used the Infection game mode and was played on the Foundry map. It only lasted for 3 minutes and 19 seconds.

The developer reveals that, taking into account the number of matches and the medium duration of one encounter, all this means that the Halo 3 players have logged in some 64,109 years of play time, or about 2 trillion seconds. The company is eager to point out that custom games and offline matches are not included in these figures.

By comparison, Halo 2, which was the first in the series launched on the Xbox, has only generated 798 million matches until now. Both Halo 2 and Halo 3 are among the most popular games on Xbox Live for the console on which they were released.

The only game that comes close in terms of popularity, as far as multiplayer matches go, is the Activision published and Infinity Ward developed Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. It has been reported that the shooter has seen more than 10 million unique online users on Xbox Live. Unfortunately, Infinity Ward has not said how much time the players spent in online matches.

The popularity of Halo 3 is set to increase even further in the fall of this year, as Halo: ODST is launched. The new content will not feature the ubiquitous Master Chief and will have a very different play style from the previous games. Still, bearing the Halo name and being developed by Bungie will probably assure healthy sales.