A decade ago, the iPad was new and Apple didn’t know how it would change life. Instagram was something millennials were talking about. Snapchat was a new kid on the block. And Mojang Studios was stealing the spotlight with the sandbox video game called Minecraft. Though it was first made public in May 2009, two years later it became a rage.
Purchased more than 200m times, a decade later it remains one of the most played video games in the world to the point that it has crossed another milestone — YouTube videos of the game have passed one trillion views. Yes, trillion with a ‘T’.
It’s a simple game in which players build whatever they fancy in the form of a blocky landscape. But that has been enough to create a Minecraft generation. Social critic Walter Benjamin wrote in 1924: “Children are particularly fond of haunting any site where things are being visibly worked on. They are irresistibly drawn by the detritus generated by building, gardening, housework, tailoring or carpentry.” And playing with blocks on Minecraft has turned out to be a wholesome activity. You enter a virtual world where you produce blocks of wood, which eventually gives birth to a civilisation and then comes tools to navigate a hostile environment and turn it into something liveable. And talented modellers in the Minecraft universe have flooded YouTube with their impressive creations, from The Shire (Middle-earth) to scale models of Hogwarts.
Minecraft creator Markus Persson Sourced by The Telegraph
Kudos to Markus “Notch” Persson for creating this hit game, coding it as a downloadable PC title. He was inspired by a game he enjoyed playing — Dwarf Fortress in which the player is tasked with helping a group of dwarf warriors build a fortress in bedrock. The player puts a group of dwarves to work on different tasks, like chopping down trees and cooking food. The other two games that fascinated him were RollerCoaster Tycoon and Dungeon Keeper. The former is an amusement-park simulator in which the player builds roller coasters while the latter is a strategy game in which the player digs cave passages and populates them with monsters and traps as protection against attacking plunderers.
The team that created Minecraft ultimately became the development studio Mojang, which released an early version of the game in 2009. Persson left the company in 2014, when it was bought by Microsoft for $2.5bn.
To celebrate the one trillion milestone, YouTube has released an animated video featuring moments from the history of Minecraft on the platform. One popular early video, from creator CaptainSparklez, picked up 145 million views with a Minecraft-inspired riff on Coldplay’s popular song Viva La Vida, called Fallen Kingdom. Another depicts the creator Dream speeding his way through the game’s “end” in less than 23 minutes, picking up 29.6 million views. And the game is not going away anytime soon, especially at a time when more companies are looking to build digital metaverse worlds for people to socialise in.
