Justin Hartline
Originally released on May 19, 2009, Minecraft is a game with a simple premise which inspired a whole generation of gamers.
A Brief History
Minecraft started out, humbly enough, as the development project of a single person, Markus Persson (better known by his screen name, Notch). I had played a version when it originally started to take off, but I was unimpressed. Version 1.0 was much simpler than what it would become and only possessed 32 out of the current version’s over 150 block types. The gameplay was simple and involved exploring a large, randomly-generated world, while building structures by placing or removing blocks. At this point the game was very much what would now be called an “early access” title, and Notch regularly updated the game adding new features.
In September, Notch added a survival mode to the game. This mode added a health bar as well enemy “mobs” to the game. The original mobs were pig, spider, zombie, and skeleton, as well as the first introduction of the game’s iconic Creeper.
By June of 2010, Notch was making enough money to quit his day job to work on Minecraft full-time. This additional free time allowed him to release the Alpha version of the game, which added different biomes to the game which increased the variety of the game’s randomly generated world. It also saw the addition of the Nether, a Hell-like landscape accessed by building a magic portal. The last major enhancement during this time was the creation of Redstone. Redstone allowed for the creation of machines in the game that can do many different things.
Multiplayer was a major part of Minecraft since the Alpha, but at this point in development, different platform versions were not compatible. In late 2017, Mojang released the Better Together Update, which allowed the Xbox One version to interact and play with the Mobile and Windows 10 versions. This update came to the Nintendo Switch in June of 2018, allowing virtually every modern version of the game to interact regardless of platform (Sony continues to disallow cross-platform play and thus Mojang maintains a separate version of Minecraft for the PS4).
At this point the game saw such rapid growth that Notch could no longer keep up with it on his own, resulting in the creation of Mojang as a video game developer and the expansion of that company. At this point, sales of Minecraft rocketed Mojang to success.
On Octobor 7, 2011, Mojang released a version of the game for Android and an iOS version quickly followed on November 17. By September 2014, Minecraft had received versions released on Xbox 360, PS3, PS4 and Xbox One. Later that same month, Notch sold Mojang to Microsoft and officially stepped down from the company. Rather than maintain Minecraft as a console exclusive under the company’s Xbox brand, Microsoft continued to release new versions of the software, including a version for Playstation’s Vita, and Nintendo’s Wii U and Switch.
Minecraft and Me
I didn’t really get involved with the game until late last year. I have a game group that periodically gets together, and we were starting to get burned out on Destiny 2 following the Forsaken expansion. Several people in the group had already been playing Minecraft pretty hard and suggested it as a replacement game. At this point, I had already had the Switch version of the game for a couple of months but hadn’t put more than a few hours into it. We spent a few weeks getting used to the game and then one member of our group set up a special server for us all to play in.
The game is fun enough to play by yourself between its mining/resource-gathering component and its crafting/building component; but playing as a group is something else altogether. Our first community project was setting up a Nether hub to join all of our bases together. Having about ten other people all on at the same time is an interesting experience and made it difficult to work without getting in each other’s way, though the scale of the project mitigated that somewhat.
The best part of the the game is seeing what everyone does with it. I had previously looked at YouTube video to see complicated builds, but actually creating something like that is something else entirely. I’ve always been a big fan of Lego and I did use my Lego R2D2 as a model for my base. Of course now Lego Makes Minecraft sets, so that’s just something else I might want to collect.
It’s also cool that the game is still receiving updates, so every few months there’s something new to see or build with. The Aquatic Update added complexity to the oceans of Minecraft and the Village and Pillage Update added new events to the game.
Whether you’ve played before or are a newcomer to the game, now is the perfect time to hop in.
Justin Hartline has a degree in Chemistry and puts his science knowledge to use as an investigator at a liquid coating company. His Dorky credentials include a love of Science Fiction (especially Star Wars), Fantasy (especially Game of Thrones), and superhero (especially Marvel) genres. He’s also a big fan of Nintendo games!
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