We've heard a lot about the Xbox Live Arcade version of Minecraft selling like gangbusters--most recently crossing six million on the platform. But nothing puts popularity in perspective quite like time spent, and the game has reached an impressive milestone there too: 1 billion hours.

Microsoft announced the number today. That's only for the XBLA version, mind you, not the PC version which has reached 10 million sales and been around significantly longer. This little Minecraft thing might go places.

To put that in perspective, it means that the average total playtime for its six million players is 167 hours. Or to frame it a different way, that totals to just over 100,000 years. To reach this count a single person would have had to start playing sometime in the Paleolithic era. It's a really long time, is our point.