Minecraft is more than alive – and here’s why

The following statement might surprise you, but the creation of Minecraft is one of the greatest contributions to the gaming industry. It’s an exceptionally rare case, which can be somewhat compared to the birth of a supernova. Perhaps, Markus “Notch” Persson was destined to make this game and this game only – he hasn’t developed anything remotely as influential as Minecraft since its initial release. Moreover, the game is still popular and more than alive – and we’ve decided to find out why.

The definition of freedom

Back in 2009, the concept of Minecraft was hard to believe in since it potentially offered complete freedom for players. When the game released in 2011, the number of available features was overwhelming – there wasn’t a single other game capable do doing the same amazing things. And the complete freedom was real. The possibilities were almost unlimited – in Survival mode, you were able to create a wholly unique world where none of the encounters would repeat itself. Simplistic voxel visuals somehow perfectly fitted the overall picture – it was a welcoming and very hospitable schematic universe. And what was even more valuable, you were supposed to learn this universe on your own. Learn from your own attempts and mistakes. Learn from failing over and over again. Personally, I knew nothing about Minecraft when I first installed it almost ten years ago. I punched a few trees, dug a few cubes of sand with my hands, waited until the sun hid behind the horizon, and died a horrible death to zombies and skeletons. That was the moment when I fell in love with the game.

The world of Minecraft is the world of countless opportunities – and that’s why the players love exploring it so much.

The game brought together a lot of attracting features, concepts, mechanics, and ideas. First of all, each procedurally generated map was infinite and unique – and on top of that, you could interact with literally everything you saw. Each block was a separate entity, and you could use them to build whatever you wanted and craft new materials, items, tools, and whatsoever else. To be more effective, you needed to go deeper digging into the ground in a never-ending search for rare ores and metals – and the dark depths of the world were always hiding dangers around every corner. The RPG and adventurous aspects of the game greatly added to the experience – you were learning to live in a hostile world so that you could tame and conquer it later. You were the master of your own story, no one was telling you where to go and what to do, and you never knew what would happen next. It felt almost as good as the real life – and it was fairly easy to get lost in Minecraft’s welcoming environment.

Open your imagination

Another huge freedom the game offered was the freedom of creativity. The community started exploring artistic possibilities of Minecraft from the very beginning – and very soon, the Internet was full of tutorials, in-game creations, and databases with a rich variety of breathtaking builds. The voxel nature of the game literally allowed for making 3D pixel-arts – but on top of that, you could make proper architectural masterpieces. Huge towns, fantasy castles, spaceships, pirate ships, historical builds, scenes from modern culture, you name it – there were no limits for creativity in Minecraft. The gaming community started establishing new servers to unite those people who loved the game and wanted to enjoy it together. This initiative paved the way to creating huge enterprises like, for instance, Hypixel – if you’ve ever played Minecraft, there’s a high probability that you’ve at least once visited their servers. And how about the Yogscast – those glorious British YouTube bastards who made even more people fall in love with the title?

Over the years, the game was enriched with mobs and NPCs, biomes and blocks, items and structures, etc. There’s no end to making more content for Minecraft.

But wait, there’s more. Thanks to the Redstone mechanics, you could build a real working computer inside the game! And also make various machinery, traps, automated structures, etc. The concept of the game allowed for creating custom skins and texture packs; talented programmers could even make full-on scenarios for proper role-playing adventure maps! Obviously, there were many attempts to repeat Minecraft’s glorious story and success – but no one has ever gotten anywhere near to the initial, very simple, yet unbelievably attractive and rich concept of Notch’s game. Markus became a millionaire with the help of the gift he presented to the world – and this is a reason to be grateful, even though he later decided to sell the IP along with his studio Mojang to Microsoft. Luckily, Minecraft has never been limited by Notch – you can’t limit the idea of freedom. The game is bigger than its creator, and this is the main reason why in 2019, the title is still more than alive.

Once again, it’s 2019 – and Minecraft has been recently granted a native RTX support and has just received yet another update from Mojang. The story of the game is a story of pure love from both ends – from the developers and from the community. The phenomenon of Minecraft’s longevity is easy to understand if you are familiar with the project. It has countless possibilities to entertain yourself whether you are a talented creator or a humble cobblestone-dong builder. This is the land of free will and countless opportunities – and the game also served as an inspiration for many developers to make their projects deeper and more diverse. Will there ever be a sad finale to this story? Unlikely.