Great work, gamers, we touched digital grass and walked 270,000 more miles than Artemis 2's historic mission around the moon last week
Overview & Key Takeaways
We've one-upped astronauts going to the moon. I think.
On average, our moon is 238,855 miles away from Earth. If you were to impossibly try to drive there, at the UK's national motorway speed limit of 70mph, it would take you over 3412 hours, or 142 days. And that's just for a one-way trip. It's an unfathomable distance, and yet it's really not that far in the grand scheme of things—Venus is the closest planet to us (most of the time, at least), and that's 24 million miles away at best. You wouldn't catch me attempting the trip.
NASA's recent Artemis 2 mission, which saw astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Jeremy Hansen fly around the moon, travelling further than any human in history, covered a total distance of around 700,237 miles. Again, that's incredibly far—it took the astronauts ten days.
To one-up the astronauts' achievements, Kojima Productions decided to track and compare the Artemis 2 mission's journey to gamers' humble delivery driver efforts in Death Stranding 2's post-apocalyptic America. In the same ten-day period from April 1 until April 10, players across PS5 and PC travelled a total distance of 969,703 miles during delivery missions.
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And before you bring up vehicles, that data is only counting walking, not any type of vehicles like the cruiser or monorail. That's important because you get your first vehicle very early in Death Stranding 2 compared to the first game, and you'll basically always want to use one. We moved our digital legs to power through almost 270,000 more miles than a historic lunar flyby mission in a state-of-the-art spacecraft. Eat that, NASA.
While walking inside a game is much, much easier on your body and mind than being cramped in a box and shot at the moon, it's impressive when you consider that the PS5 version launched last year, and the PC version is now a month old. It opened to just under 58,000 concurrent players on Steam at launch, and had dropped to between 20-30,000 concurrents during the recorded window. It wasn't exactly the prime time for beating the record. Next time it should be on even footing, I reckon, and we'd probably have travelled more than double the distance.
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