Minecraft: Building its way to the top one block at a time
Greetings and Salutations! Welcome again to Popular Video Games where we learn about popular games that have influenced the industry with some useless video game knowledge sprinkled in.
Minecraft: An infinite world
Today, I want to talk about not just A video game, but THE video game. That’s right, I’m talking about Minecraft. Frankly, you can’t have a gaming blog and not mention perhaps one of the biggest franchise influencing games of all time. Though it was only released in 2011, Minecraft has quickly become the top selling video game of all time.
Take a step back in time to 2010. The world was a lot different than it is today. We were only on the iPhone 4, Barack Obama was President and the words “mine” and “craft” had never been used together before. Fast forward a year and we still had the iPhone 4 and Barack Obama, but now we had something never seen before, Minecraft.
What like, even is Minecraft anyway?
Made by Markus “Notch” Persson, Minecraft is a game all about blocks, mining and (you guessed it) crafting! Minecraft is a game about doing whatever you want to do. Depending on the mode you are playing on, you can enter a world and build anything you want with infinite resources, or you can test your skills by living off the land and fighting monsters that come out at night. Either way, there is enough content to keep you playing forever if you aren’t careful!
If you have never heard of Minecraft before, you might be asking yourself various questions such as, “What is the purpose of this game?”, “How do you win?” and “Is it really infinite?”. Well, the purpose of the game is to have a great time. You can do whatever you want, whenever you want by building anything you want. You technically can’t “win” Minecraft because it’s never-ending and there is no real goal besides to have a good time. Finally, Minecraft is yes, indeed infinite. Introduced in patch 0.9.0, the randomly-generated worlds became infinite, so you can go on exploring and building forever.
Why does this even matter anyways?
Well it matters because Minecraft is the best selling game of all time, which just so happens to be no small feat. Selling over 176,000,000 copies, it beat out the previous best selling game, Tetris. Those are some big shoes to fill. Minecraft didn’t just affect the gaming industry with its release either, it affected the whole world. There are Minecraft clothes, toys and books. There have been several Minecraft spin-off games, as well as a whole host of clones that stole the same concept from Minecraft, but just couldn’t do it better. Soon, there is going to be an augmented reality Minecraft game called Minecraft Earth to bring it into the real world, just like Pokémon GO did.
If you grew up playing Minecraft like I did, then why not hop back into the game and see what has changed, and if you’ve never played before, then you have to give it a try!
Do you like Minecraft? Do you think it deserved to be the best selling game in history? Do you have any awesome memories of Minecraft? Share them with me and let me know your thoughts on our topic or ideas for future topics!
As always, thanks for stopping by and I’ll smell ya later!
