Everyone's heard about Minecraft. Few, however, know why it was created and how it all began. Here's the history of the game
Minecraft
Minecraft is one of the biggest games in the world, if not the biggest. How could a small indie game with no funding and only one developer become the phenomenon it is today? Let’s take a trip down memory lane together and find out 👇
If you’re an avid Minecraft player, or know your way around the game, you can skip this part. Before we look through the history books, let’s summarise how this epic game is played out. Minecraft is arguably the most influential of sandbox games. The player is dropped into a large randomised open world (actually infinite) with biomes such as mountains, forests, caves, plains and oceans – with no specific goal or objective. Progression can only be reached through an Achievements system. The world consists of cubes, or blocks, which you can destroy, remove, build, or replace. It also has a night/day cycle. Depending on the set difficulty level, players need to eat and defend themselves from hostile mobs during the night.
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Through various Game Modes chosen at the start of each new game, players will experience a different adventure. If you just want to focus on building amazing things, you should choose Creative Mode. If you want a real adventure, boom, Adventure Mode is for you. If you want “the real deal” where you’re struggling for survival, Survival Mode is the perfect fit. These various modes make the game even more replayable.
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The beginning
Alright, now you know how the game is played out. It’s time to learn how it all started. Minecraft is the brainchild of the Swedish programmer Markus ‘Notch’ Persson who previously worked at the video game developers King and later jAlbum. Before laying all of his focus on Minecraft, Notch developed a few prototypes during his off-hours, inspired by popular games at the time. Among the prototypes were RubyDung, a base-building game, and Infiniminer, a block-based mining game. I think we all see how the ideas behind Minecraft were being formed.
The first edition of Minecraft, called Java Edition, was made by Notch during a weekend in early May 2009. The game was initially released to the public on May 17 on the TIGSource forum, a forum for independent game developers. After feedback from his peers, Notch updated the game to what nowadays is called the Classic version. A few more updates were released during the next couple of months, the Indev and Infdevs versions, before the first major update, Alpha, was released on June 30, 2010. It was around this time that Minecraft was beginning to pick up speed.
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