‘Minecraft’ 101: Get to Know the Blocky Blockbuster
It’s official: Minecraft is now owned by Microsoft.
The price? A cool $2.5 billion, which, even in a world where big money regularly flies back and forth, seems extravagant for a company with one hit video game to its credit. Of course, Minecraft isn’t just any video game.
So what is it? It’s what you make of it, actually.
Minecraft often draws comparisons to LEGO, and for good reason: It’s all about building things. Players wander around a giant world made of chunky cubes and go about mining those blocks to create useful structures and items.
Initially, that world is like a huge pile of unmolded clay, a blocky frontier. It doesn’t stay that way for long. At Minecraft’s core is a robust crafting system that turns every single block into a potential resource. Dirt becomes the foundation of your first home; fancier ore turns your hut into a castle. You’ll smelt iron into armor and turn trees into dressers. The more you mine, the more you acquire, and the more you can create.
There are two modes to Minecraft: Survival and Creative. In the former, players mine resources and build items during the day so that they can make it through the night, when the world is beset by nasty creatures. Ever overhear your kid grumbling about Creepers? Yeah, those are from Minecraft, and they have a tendency to sneak up and explode all over your hard work. Dig deep enough and you might stumble upon giant, terrifying enemies like the Ender Dragon. Defeat it and you’ve essentially “beaten” Minecraft.
It looks scarier in the game.
But most players would agree that this isn’t really a game about beating anything — it’s a game about flexing your creative muscle. That’s what Creative mode is for, as it unlocks all the goodies from the start, turns off damage and hunger, and grants you the ability to fly across the world. It turns Minecraft into a blank canvas, and players have taken advantage in impossibly cool ways: King’s Landing from A Game of Thrones, pixel art Pokemon — some lunatic even built a working computer inside the game.
That must have earned a big smile from Markus “Notch” Persson, the 35-year-old Swedish programmer/billionaire who invented Minecraft in his spare time. First made public in 2009, Minecraft enjoyed an immediate cult following, though Persson didn’t intend it to be a big deal.
“I designed the game for myself — that’s an audience I know,” he once said, though he clearly underestimated his knowledge of the broader gaming audience.
At the end of 2011, the first version of the game was officially completed, at which point Notch promptly fired himself from the project so that he could work on other things. The Minecraft community took on a life of its own, however, and the game quickly turned into an unstoppable pop culture juggernaut.
In 2012 alone, Persson earned $101 million through licensing the game. To date, it’s been downloaded more than 100 million times on PCs. Despite its age, Minecraft is a mainstay in the console software Top 10. Minecraft: Pocket Edition has been planted on the App Store paid chart forever (it’s currently sitting at No. 2).
Beyond the LEGO-like creative freedom, Minecraft has benefited from a rabid fan base. Player-made modifications — commonly known as “mods” — that dramatically change the way the game plays have become hugely popular. It’s been a boon for YouTube, too: A simple search for Minecraft yields more than 90,000,000 results spanning tutorials, play-throughs, and lord knows what else. It’s even infiltrating the classroom.
What started as a simple video game has evolved into a veritable platform — and now that platform belongs to Microsoft. Here’s hoping it builds something cool with it.
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