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Minecraft is a 2011 sandbox game developed by Mojang Studios and originally released in 2009. The game was created by Markus "Notch" Persson in the Java programming language. Following several early private testing versions, it was first made public in May 2009 before being fully released on November 18, 2011, with Notch stepping down and Jens "Jeb" Bergensten taking over development. Minecraft has become the best-selling video game in history, with over 300 million copies sold and nearly 140 million monthly active players as of 2023. Over the years following its release, it has been ported to several platforms, including PC, mobile and various consoles.

In Minecraft, players explore a blocky, pixelated procedurally generated, three-dimensional world with virtually infinite terrain. Players can discover and extract raw materials, craft tools and items, and build structures, earthworks, and machines. Depending on their chosen game mode, players can fight hostile mobs, as well as cooperate with or compete against other players in the same world. Game modes include a survival mode (in which players must acquire resources to build in the world and maintain health), creative mode (in which players have unlimited resources and the ability to fly), spectator mode (in which players can fly, go through blocks, and enter the bodies of other players and entities), adventure mode (in which players have to survive without being able to build and place blocks) and hardcore mode (in which the difficulty is set to Hard and dying causes the player to lose their ability to play on that world). The game's large community also offers a wide variety of user-generated content, such as modifications, servers, skins, texture packs, and custom maps, which add new game mechanics and possibilities.

Minecraft has received critical acclaim, winning several awards and being cited by some as one of the greatest video games ever created; social media, parodies, adaptations, merchandise, and the annual Minecon conventions played prominent roles in popularizing the game. The game has also been used in educational environments to teach chemistry, computer-aided design, and computer science. In 2014, Mojang and the Minecraft intellectual property were purchased by Microsoft for US$2.5 billion. Several spin-offs have also been made, including Minecraft: Story Mode, Minecraft Earth, Minecraft Dungeons, and Minecraft Legends. In addition, a live-action film of the same name is scheduled for a theatrical release in 2025.

In September 2019, The Guardian classified Minecraft as the best video game of (the first two decades of) the 21st century,[336] and in November 2019 Polygon called the game the "most important game of the decade" in its 2010s "decade in review".[337] In December 2019, Forbes gave Minecraft a special mention in a list of the best video games of the 2010s, stating that the game is "without a doubt one of the most important games of the last ten years."[338] In June 2020, Minecraft was inducted into the World Video Game Hall of Fame.[339]

Minecraft is recognized as one of the first successful games to use an early access model to draw in sales prior to its full release version to help fund development.[340] As Minecraft helped to bolster indie game development in the early 2010s, it also helped to popularize the use of the early access model in indie game development.[341]

Jordan Maron (known professionally as "CaptainSparklez") is known for his musical Minecraft parodies of popular songs.

Social media sites such as YouTube, Facebook, and Reddit have played a significant role in popularizing Minecraft.[342] Research conducted by the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg School of Communication showed that one-third of Minecraft players learned about the game via Internet videos.[343] In 2010, Minecraft-related videos began to gain influence on YouTube, often made by commentators. The videos usually contain screen-capture footage of the game and voice-overs.[344] Common coverage in the videos includes creations made by players, walkthroughs of various tasks, and parodies of works in popular culture. By May 2012, over four million Minecraft-related YouTube videos had been uploaded.[345] The game would go on to be a prominent fixture within YouTube's gaming scene during the entire 2010s; in 2014, it was the second-most searched term on the entire platform.[346] By 2018, it was still YouTube's biggest game globally.[347]

Some popular commentators have received employment at Machinima, a gaming video company that owns a highly watched entertainment channel on YouTube.[344] The Yogscast is a British company that regularly produces Minecraft videos; their YouTube channel has attained billions of views, and their panel at Minecon 2011 had the highest attendance.[344][348] Other well-known YouTube personalities include Jordan Maron, who has created many Minecraft parodies, including "Minecraft Style", a parody of the internationally successful single "Gangnam Style" by South Korean rapper Psy.[349] Minecraft's popularity on YouTube was described by Polygon as quietly dominant, although in 2019, thanks in part to PewDiePie's playthroughs of the game, Minecraft experienced a visible uptick in popularity on the platform.[346][350] YouTube later announced that on 14 December 2021 that the total amount of Minecraft-related views exceeded one trillion since the game's inception in 2009.[351]

Minecraft has been referenced by other video games, such as Torchlight II, Team Fortress 2,[352][353] Borderlands 2, Choplifter HD, Super Meat Boy, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, The Binding of Isaac, The Stanley Parable, FTL: Faster Than Light,[354][355] and Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, the lattermost of which features a downloadable character and stage based on Minecraft.[356] It was also referenced by electronic music artist deadmau5 in his performances.[357] The game is also referenced heavily in "Informative Murder Porn", the second episode of the seventeenth season of the animated television series South Park.[358]

Applications

The possible applications of Minecraft have been discussed extensively, especially in the fields of computer-aided design (CAD) and education. In a panel at Minecon 2011, a Swedish developer discussed the possibility of using the game to redesign public buildings and parks, stating that rendering using Minecraft was much more user-friendly for the community, making it easier to envision the functionality of new buildings and parks.[344] In 2012, a member of the Human Dynamics group at the MIT Media Lab, Cody Sumter, said: "Notch hasn't just built a game. He's tricked 40 million people into learning to use a CAD program." Various software has been developed to allow virtual designs to be printed using professional 3D printers or personal printers such as MakerBot and RepRap.[359]

In September 2012, Mojang began the Block by Block project in cooperation with UN Habitat to create real-world environments in Minecraft.[360][361] The project allows young people who live in those environments to participate in designing the changes they would like to see. Using Minecraft, the community has helped reconstruct the areas of concern, and citizens are invited to enter the Minecraft servers and modify their own neighborhood. Carl Manneh, Mojang's managing director, called the game "the perfect tool to facilitate this process", adding "The three-year partnership will support UN-Habitat's Sustainable Urban Development Network to upgrade 300 public spaces by 2016." Mojang signed Minecraft building community, FyreUK, to help render the environments into Minecraft. The first pilot project began in Kibera, one of Nairobi's informal settlements and is in the planning phase. The Block by Block project is based on an earlier initiative started in October 2011, Mina Kvarter (My Block), which gave young people in Swedish communities a tool to visualize how they wanted to change their part of town. According to Manneh, the project was a helpful way to visualize urban planning ideas without necessarily having a training in architecture. The ideas presented by the citizens were a template for political decisions.[362][363]

A yarn Minecraft sheep

In April 2014, the Danish Geodata Agency generated all of Denmark in fullscale in Minecraft based on their own geodata.[364] This is possible because Denmark is one of the flattest countries with the highest point at 171 meters (ranking as the country with the 30th smallest elevation span), where the limit in default Minecraft was around 192 meters above in-game sea level when the project was completed.[365][366]

Taking advantage of the game's accessibility where other websites are censored, the non-governmental organization Reporters Without Borders has used an open Minecraft server to create the Uncensored Library, a repository within the game of journalism by authors from countries (including Egypt, Mexico, Russia, Saudi Arabia and Vietnam) who have been censored and arrested, such as Jamal Khashoggi.[367] The neoclassical virtual building was created over about 250 hours by an international team of 24 people.[368]

Despite its unpredictable nature, Minecraft has become a popular game for speedrunning, where players time themselves from being dropped into a new world to reaching The End and defeating the Ender Dragon boss. Some speedrunners use a combination of mods, external programs, and debug menus, while other runners play the game in a more vanilla or more consistency-oriented way.[369][370]

Education

Minecraft being played in an educational setting

Minecraft has also been used in educational settings.[371] In 2011, an educational organization named MinecraftEdu was formed with the goal of introducing Minecraft into schools. The group works with Mojang to make the game affordable and accessible to schools. The version of Minecraft through MinecraftEdu includes unique features to allow teachers to monitor the students' progress within the virtual world, such as receiving screenshots from students to show completion of a lesson.[372] In September 2012, MinecraftEdu said that approximately 250,000 students around the world have access to Minecraft through the company.[373] A wide variety of educational activities involving the game have been developed to teach students various subjects, including history, language arts and science. For an example, one teacher built a world consisting of various historical landmarks for students to learn and explore.[373] Another teacher created a large-scale representation of an animal cell within Minecraft that student could explore and learn how cell functions work.[372] Great Ormond Street Hospital has been recreated in Minecraft, and it proposed that patients can use it to virtually explore the hospital before they visit it in real life.[374] Minecraft may also prove as an innovation in computer-aided design.[375] Minecraft offers an outlet of collaboration in design and could have an impact on the industry.[376]

With the introduction of redstone blocks to represent electrical circuits, users have been able to build functional virtual computers within Minecraft.[377] Such virtual creations include a working hard drive,[378] an 8-bit virtual computer,[379] and even a smaller-scale version of Minecraft that is playable and able to be built completely in survival mode with no external modifications.[380] In at least one instance, a mod has been created to use this feature to teach younger players how to program within a language set by a virtual computer within a Minecraft world.[381]

Another computational mechanic in Minecraft is the command block, a block that is only accessible in creative mode and can alter game logic. It has been used to create emulators for the Atari 2600 (including one by YouTube personality SethBling)[382][383] and the Game Boy Advance.[384]

In September 2014, the British Museum in London announced plans to recreate its building along with all exhibits in Minecraft in conjunction with members of the public.[385] Microsoft and the non-profit organisation Code.org had teamed up to offer Minecraft-based games, puzzles, and tutorials aimed to help teach children how to program; by March 2018, Microsoft and Code.org reported that more than 85 million children have used their tutorials.[386]

Clones

Following the initial surge in popularity of Minecraft in 2010, other video games were criticised for having various similarities to Minecraft, and some were described as being "clones", often due to a direct inspiration from Minecraft, or only a superficial similarity. Examples include Ace of Spades, CastleMiner, CraftWorld, FortressCraft, Terraria, BlockWorld 3D, Total Miner,[387] and Minetest.[388] David Frampton, designer of The Blockheads, reported that one failure of his 2D game was the "low resolution pixel art" that too closely resembled the art in Minecraft, which resulted in "some resistance" from fans.[389] A homebrew adaptation of the alpha version of Minecraft for the Nintendo DS, titled DScraft, has been released; it has been noted for its similarity to the original game considering the technical limitations of the system.[390] In response to Microsoft's acquisition of Mojang and their Minecraft IP, various developers announced further clone titles developed specifically for Nintendo's consoles, as they were the only major platforms not to officially receive Minecraft at the time.[391] These clone titles include UCraft (Nexis Games),[392] Cube Life: Island Survival (Cypronia),[393] Discovery (Noowanda),[394] Battleminer (Wobbly Tooth Games),[395] Cube Creator 3D (Big John Games),[396] and Stone Shire (Finger Gun Games).[397] Despite this, the fears of fans were unfounded, with official Minecraft releases on Nintendo consoles eventually resuming.[398][399][11]

Markus Persson made another similar game, Minicraft, for a Ludum Dare competition in 2011.[400]

Minecon

Main article: Minecon

Minecon is the annual official fan convention dedicated to Minecraft. The first Minecon was held in November 2011 at the Mandalay Bay Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas.[401] The event included the official launch of Minecraft; keynote speeches, including one by Persson; building and costume contests; Minecraft-themed breakout classes; exhibits by leading gaming and Minecraft-related companies; commemorative merchandise; and autograph and picture times with Mojang employees and well-known contributors from the Minecraft community.[402] In 2016, Minecon was held in-person for the last time, with the following years featuring annual livestreams instead.