Minecraft is the most purchased game of all time, with over 180 million copies sold. It is, however, relatively old, with it being released over a decade ago; so what gave it its longevity? Well, that’s what we’ll find out in this article. In another article, we’ll start piecing together the plot of Minecraft, and hopefully, by the end of this academic year, we’ll have found the hidden lore of the world’s most famous game. But before we find out the lore of Minecraft, we need to know the history of Minecraft.
What made Minecraft the world’s most famous game?
To find this out, we need to tell you the origins of Minecraft, or as it was first called, Cave Game.
Cave Game
“My God, I realized that that was the game I wanted to do… I tried to implement a simple first person engine in that style, reusing some art and code (although not as much as you think) from RubyDung.” Markus Persson (Notch) wrote on his Tumblr. He was talking about how the design of Minecraft was based on Infiniminer.
Cave Game was like a beta version of Minecraft Alpha; it only took 8 days to make and was coded in Java, making it extremely identifiable by its contrast and saturation. While it wasn’t great, without it we wouldn’t have Minecraft.
“The response was very positive, and I was blown away by the framerate and how well it ran in a browser, so I decided to go with it.” Notch wrote.
He got the character models from a game called Zombie Town, and then changed the name from Cave Game to Minecraft.
Alpha
Minecraft started being sold on June 13th, 2009. Less than a month later, 1000+ copies were sold and had 20000+ registered players. It got to the point where Notch had to spend less hours on his day job so that he could maintain Minecraft.
“I thought, if I don’t charge, I’ll never get paid. If I wait until the game is done, it’s never going to be done because I won’t have the money to sustain development.” Notch on why he made Minecraft a game you need to pay to play.
Later that year, ‘survival mode’ testing began, which arguably made Minecraft what it is today. The game eventually became so popular that, in May 2010, Notch actually quit his day job. Around this time, Friday updates started being released, these updates added beloved features to minecraft like sugarcane (first called reeds), redstone, and many others.
Notch was later joined by Jakob Porser, Daniel Kaplan, Carl Manneh, artist Markus Toivonen and coder Jens Bergensten. As Minecraft’s sales continued to expand, the team would grow along with it.
Following success
On January 12th of 2011, there were over 1 million registered Minecraft accounts. Just about six months later, that number decoupled. Minecraft was undoubtedly a large game.
There was, however, a problem: Minecraft was coded with Java, and Java isn’t really the best programme to use for a game that 10 million people were playing.
Luckily, this helped start a community of ‘modders’. Some mods, such as the aether, added a bunch of features (usually a new dimension- mobs and/or weapons), while others such as optifine and smooth lighting made the game look and run better.
Sometimes, Mojang (the company that the Minecraft developers made) would work with some mod developers and implement their features into vanilla (unmodded) Minecraft.
C++
On August 16, 2011, Minecraft pocket edition (MCPE) was released, although it was only on android at first, it offered a mobile Minecraft experience. And although it was lacking features at first, it eventually caught up with the PC version of Minecraft (which we will now call Java).
Along with MCPE and Java, the console version was made in 2012, this time with the help of the Scottish company 4j studios.
Full Release
On the 18th of November 2011, Minecraft was officially released, the day before, MCPE was available on iOS.
1.0.0 was the first official version of Minecraft- though that isn’t the only big part of the update; it also added a new dimension, The End, fittingly named as it’s often considered to be the end of the game. It also added other features, such as brewing and hardcore mode (a gamemode where you can’t respawn and you only have one life).
More and more versions
Minecraft continued growing its empire even after it was released. Minecraft: Pi Edition was originally announced on the Mojang website on November 24, 2012. There was a compiled build labeled 0.1 on the Mojang repository, albeit encrypted until the game’s launch in February 2013, making it inaccessible. When it was first uploaded, however, it was unprotected for a short amount of time, allowing for the download of the game before its true release.
Later in 2013, the game’s exclusivity clause with Microsoft elapsed, and versions for PS3, PS4 and PSVita were announced; Minecraft had well and truly outgrown its indie game status. And Persson, as the oft-maligned figurehead of the biggest gaming phenomenon the world had ever seen, was struggling under the weight of online pressure.
Microsoft purchase
“Anyone want to buy my share of Mojang,” Notch tweeted in June 2014, “so I can move on with my life? Getting hate for trying to do the right thing is not my gig.”
CEO Carl Manneh’s phone immediately lit up with enquiries as to whether Persson was serious- and he was. Activision, Blizzard, and EA all showed an interest in buying Mojang, but the company’s previous relationship with Microsoft made it obvious who would own Mojang…
Microsoft wasn’t actually always interested in buying Minecraft, according to Peter Molyneux.
“I can remember coming to things like [Gamescom] back in my Microsoft days and talking to Microsoft. They thought it was rubbish. You know, it didn’t have a character, it didn’t have a story, it didn’t have a tutorial, the graphics were, you know, like 1980s graphics… they totally, totally missed that.” he told GamesRadar.
But as we now know, Microsoft didn’t miss it. In fact, not even two weeks after Minecraft was released on the XBox One, Microsoft bought Mojang for 2.5 Billion dollars and, according to some people, the end of Minecraft was near.
There is no doubt that Microsoft’s acquisition of Mojang was hated by the Minecraft community, but now that we know what actually happened after the purchase, it seems that people were just overreacting. I would even argue that the Microsoft deal was actually the best thing that ever happened to Minecraft since the days of Alpha. The reasoning behind my stance? One word. Bedrock.
Bedrock
2015 was a big year for Minecraft. MineCon 2015, at London’s Excel centre, was an extremely crowded event. It broke the Guinness World Record for the largest convention for a single videogame. The Pocket edition was also soon ported to Wii U, Windows 10, Samsung’s GearVR, Apple TV and beyond.
What does the previous paragraph have to do with Minecraft Bedrock edition? Well, to answer your question, read the last sentence. All the platforms (and the Nintendo Switch) would be the starting point of Minecraft Bedrock edition. When the Better Together update rolled out, Java finally had a challenger.
After the Better Together update, there were 4 different versions of Minecraft:
- Java edition
- Raspberry Pi edition
- PS4 edition
- Bedrock edition
But soon enough, there was a fifth one…
5. Education edition
I’m not going to talk about the Education edition as that’s a story for another time, but after that, there have been no newer versions of Minecraft (as of December 7th 2019).
I, obviously, could go more in depth and talk about the updates but if you want to learn more about every one of them, you can go over to the Minecraft Wiki (https://minecraft.gamepedia.com/Minecraft_Wiki). After all, I’m just one person- while the Wiki has a bunch of people working on it at all times.
Thanks for reading this article; I put my heart and soul into it and I can’t wait for you folks to read the next article where we start piecing together the lore of Minecraft, starting with Minecraft: The Island.
