I think I played Minecraft just before it went into beta and stopped playing it when it "came out". I don't know how long that was, but Sublime Text 3 beta certainly felt even longer.
edit: correction, the beta of minecraft lasted only a year, so it definitely felt longer to me. Weird memory tricks eh.
I was going to say maybe you mixed up the alpha and beta version, but turns out Minecraft was only in alpha for six months. Weird, felt much longer for me too.
Gmail?
True; though the life cycles on update seemed much more frequent on Gmail vs ST3.