EverQuest celebrates fifth birthday

To celebrate the fifth anniversary of EverQuest, Sony Online Entertainment (SOE) has today released a list of interesting facts about the game. First launched on March 16, 1999, the massively multiplayer online role-playing game is currently played by more than 420,000 people all over the world. Other facts about EverQuest announced by SOE today include the following:

More than 2.5 million copies of the game and its expansions have been sold in boxes or digitally downloaded since 1999.

If stacked end to end, the total number of EverQuest boxes created would reach a height of more than 265 miles, which would stretch out of the Earth's atmosphere and past the orbit of the International Space Station.

EverQuest averages about 250,000 new subscribers every year. Currently, there are more than 420,000 people playing the game.

At peak times, more than 100,000 people around the globe will be playing EverQuest simultaneously. Heaviest hours of operation for EverQuest are from 5pm PST to 11pm PST, with the biggest days being Thursday and Sunday--traditionally, the biggest nights for prime-time television viewing.

There are almost 12 million characters created by players within the game. Of these 12 million, more than 3 million have been played in the last six months.

The oldest EverQuest player is 78 (part of three generations of a single family that play together from different states). The youngest is nine (he plays with his mother and father).

There are more than a million non-player characters populating the world of EverQuest, made up of nearly 400 unique types of creatures.

Total play time for all current players in the game equals more than 184,000 years.

Only 17 percent of the characters played within EverQuest are human--83 percent are composed of the 14 other fantasy races available in the game.

EverQuest currently has more than 420,000 inhabitants, making the game's population larger than 42 of America's state capitals.

There are more than 350 square miles of dungeons, mountains, plains, valleys, cities, and forests to explore in the game.

There are more than 40,000 unique items for players to discover, create, and buy within the game. More than 3,000 of these items have never been discovered by players.

There are almost 100,000 trees within the world of EverQuest.

More than 1,500 servers run the world of EverQuest, which is the equivalent of one of the world's top 100 supercomputers. More than 18 miles of wire and cable connect all these boxes together.

Over 10 quadrillion bytes of EverQuest data have left the SOE network in the past five years. That's a 10, followed by 15 zeroes.