minecraft360

At this point, it’s safe to call Minecraft a legitimate phenomenon – especially the Xbox 360 Edition, where it’s one of the best-selling games in XBLA history and spent the months since its early May release smashing records like crazy. Keeping with that tradition, 4J and Mojang Studios announced that the little game that could finished the year by hitting a staggering milestone: It passed five million sales Monday. Not bad for a game that released just a little over a third of the way into the year.

That achievement caps off an already impressive year for Minecraft: The world-building adventure game sold two million copies within its first month of release on XBLA (and at one point was averaging close to 20,000 sales a day), and a special Halloween-themed DLC skin pack raised over $500K for charity in just two weeks. The game also made history by knocking Call of Duty from the top of the Xbox LIVE Activity Charts, a first for an XBLA title. More recently, the game sold 453K copies on Christmas Day alone (although that was across all platforms, not just XBLA). To say Minecraft has been popular is a bit of an understatement; to say it’s been a huge boost to the visibility of Xbox’s digital platform even moreso.

Minecraft, originally released for PC in 2009, unleashed its highly-anticipated Xbox version in May to rave reviews (including our own, though not all our staffers agreed) and, obviously, smashing sales success. The game is currently available on XBLA for 1600 MSP, with numerous add-ons available at varying price points.