Minecraft reaches 8 million PC copies sold, Notch celebrates with cryptic number

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You know what's sold a lot of copies? The Sims 2 . But Minecraft is steadily closing the gap, with Mojang bringing word today that the PC version of their blockbusting hit has sold a whopping 8 million copies to date (8,000,139 to be exact). Mojang's Jens Bergensten responded to the news by stating that "I can't think of anything clever to say. It's simply amazing,” while Notch went one better by revealing that "69I960EHE0A4A0IVG0EHE02500R4R0G1T30PLJ00V6V0EHE0V1U01V10U5U0VGV0V4R". Honestly - he can't go one day without making a dig at Windows 8.

To clarify: huh? We've been assured that this string of seemingly nonsensical letters and numbers leads somewhere awesome, but we're completely stumped, and our Enigma machine is sadly on the fritz. We've narrowed it down to a serial number for a super-secret 0x10c alpha, some sort of Scrolls code, or Notch's Netflix password - but we're not ashamed to admit that we're probably completely wrong about all three. It therefore falls to you to decipher it for us - so make it snappy, eh?

Here's that number again: 69I960EHE0A4A0IVG0EHE02500R4R0G1T30PLJ00V6V0EHE0V1U01V10U5U0VGV0V4R

Tom Sykes
Tom Sykes

Tom loves exploring in games, whether it’s going the wrong way in a platformer or burgling an apartment in Deus Ex. His favourite game worlds—Stalker, Dark Souls, Thief—have an atmosphere you could wallop with a blackjack. He enjoys horror, adventure, puzzle games and RPGs, and played the Japanese version of Final Fantasy VIII with a translated script he printed off from the internet. Tom has been writing about free games for PC Gamer since 2012. If he were packing for a desert island, he’d take his giant Columbo boxset and a laptop stuffed with PuzzleScript games.