We always knew Pokémon Go was popular - like cultural phenomenon popular - but how big it really is has just been revealed. Prepare to have your mind melted.

Bare in mind the game has only been around since 6 July this year and even that was a limited release so it wasn’t worldwide until after that date. Despite that plenty of Pokémon have been caught and a whole bunch of miles have been walked to hatch those eggs.

As of 7 December, when the game was a more worldwide release, the Pokémon Go creator Niantic has kept track of stats. It reveals that players have walked a total of 8.7 billion kilometers and if that wasn’t impressive enough they’ve caught 88 billion Pokémon to date.

Huge numbers, right? But let’s put them into perspective. Those distances clocked up equate to 200,000 trips around the entire Earth - or to the edge of our solar system. That’s so far that it would take a commercial jet plane over 1,000 years to clock up the same amount of miles.

As for those 88 billion Pokémon that have been caught. That breaks down to an average of about 533 million Pokémon caught every single day.

Niantic recently released an update with a second generation of even more Pokémon available to find, so those numbers are only going to climb. It’ll be interesting to see how fast though, since the summer of walking outside is over and the initial popularity may have slowed down.

Whatever the long term popularity of Pokémon Go, it’s showed just how popular GPS-based augmented reality gaming is - and is likely just the beginning.

'- By Luke Edwards @eelukee'