Hi, and welcome to Big Little Moments! Each week, I’ll cover a game-changing moment in pop culture, explore what it meant at the time. Today we’re talking about Minecraft, and the 10 year anniversary of its 1.0 release.
My original plan for this blog was to draw in friends (and the moms of my friends) with hot takes on prestige television and slowly, like a frog boiled in mountain dew, expose you all to nerd shit in a controlled environment. But we passed a pretty significant anniversary this month, and it seemed like the perfect opportunity to give a rundown of the single most influential video game of our time: Minecraft!
Minecraft is maybe the single most important cultural artifact of the last decade, or perhaps of our lifetimes. Its influence will radiate outward into every nook and cranny of our culture for the rest of our lives. More than half of all children ages 6 to 9 regularly play Minecraft. In ten years, most television writers will have played Minecraft seriously at some point. In 20 years, every new writer, actor, artist, and doctor will have been acquainted with Minecraft since the time they were born. In 30 years, the same will be true of politicians.
For anyone reading this who was born before 9/11, it may seem a bit hyperbolic to frame a video game about cubes like this. It’s easy to turn up our noses at the new, nerdy trends of the time, dismissing them as stupid, unserious fuff for children. People said the same about comic books, but now Marvel’s Avengers is the flagship property for Disney - the largest media company in the world. You either get on the wagon, or you get run over.
The Alpha and Beta Days: 2009-2011
On November 18th of 2011, Markus Persson (aka Notch, we’ll get to him), the creator of Minecraft, dropped its 1.0 patch - in computer terms, basically the first “complete draft” of the game. In the ten years since, Minecraft has become the best-selling video game of all time, beating out Tetris, which had decades of lead time and cultural ubiquity on its side.
Minecraft set its first trend before 1.0 was even released. Notch posted the first editions of the game for free on game development forums, and then released the “alpha” edition of Minecraft for 10 Euro ($11.50) in 2010. The sales from the Alpha alone made Notch a fortune, and allowed him to leave his dayjob at a mobile game studio and work on Minecraft full-time.
This “open beta” model of game development has become commonplace in the modern games market, especially in indie game development. Before Minecraft, most games were released to the public as finished works, like novels, albums, or films. This new model encouraged faster development cycles, and prioritized releasing a bare-bones version with promise of more to come. Really, the only difference between an “alpha,” a “beta,” and a “finished product” are how many bugs the developer finds acceptable.
Minecraft marked a change in audience expectations, and it opened the industry’s eyes to new models of development. By allowing players in on a title before it was “finished,” developers could generate revenue on a title while they were still sorting out the bugs and putting the final touches on the game. Moreover, a new sort of feedback loop arose, where player responses could guide and shape a game as it was being created. Nowadays, players don’t expect their games to be finished when they buy them (or, publishers don’t). Patches, bug fixes, and expansions are the norm for basically every game, like buying a book where the author pops in now and then to clean up chapters.
Post-Launch, 2011-2014
Briefly, If you don’t know what the actual gameplay of Minecraft looks like (you poor thing, I hope the rock you live under keeps you dry), it’s basically Lego in video game form. The game drops you into a world made entirely out of blocks (even the sun is square), where everything can be destroyed, collected, combined, and rebuilt. Players can dig down and Mine rare resources like copper, diamond, and gold, and craft them into pickaxes, swords, armor, and thousands of other objects.
In later expansions, Minecraft included adventures, quests, and a convoluted “endgame” where you basically travel to hell and kill a dragon, but at its core, Minecraft has no story. It does little to guide the player in any direction. Again, this was a pretty big departure in the games industry. Most games were on-rails experiences, with stories and levels meticulously crafted by teams of artists. Games were experiences the developers crafted and guided a player through. Even “sandbox” games like Grand Theft Auto were at best choose-your-own-adventure books, with branching storylines and maybe a couple different “good” and “bad” endings. But the book of Minecraft had blank pages, and gave the players a pen to write their own.
Game developers of all sizes took notice. Minecraft opened the major developers’ eyes to a whole new set of tools players were eager to use, like open worlds, nonlinear gameplay, and collaboration between users as a core feature. Countless games in the aftermath saw open worlds, crafting, and nonlinear storytelling elements after Minecraft. Terraria, No Man’s Sky, Breath of the Wild, Slime Rancher, and countless others have borrowed from Minecraft’s playbook in the years since. Even Nintendo, who historically had guarded their IP closely, allowed users to make and share their own content in Super Mario Maker. Minecraft even inspired the game that may one day defeat it - Fortnite.
Through this open-ended, game-as-a-platform model, users naturally shared their content, and collaborated on bigger and bigger builds. Countless projects of impossible size have been built in Minecraft. In the early days, a massive U.S. Enterprise earned millions of views and served as an early proof of concept for what collaboration on Minecraft could look like. As the game released new features, and the user designs grew more sophisticated, the scale and complexity of builds exploded. Calculators, 1-to-1 recreations of the Earth, even fully functioning copies of Pokemon Red, where one person laid out every single byte of the game, one block at a time.
The Microsoft Age: 2014-Present
All this popularity, naturally, comes with some downsides. Video games and Internet culture as a whole have always had an uncomfortable alt-right presence, and Minecraft is no exception. For one, Minecraft’s creator Notch ended up being a huge fucking prick and after he sold the game to Microsoft in 2014, they scrubbed the game of his existence. Since then, he’s mostly stuck to tweeting a mix of transphobia and really sad shit on the Internet. He is not missed.
Microsoft’s buyout allowed Minecraft to be the cultural institution it was always meant to be. The software is now available on virtually every platform, and updates are regular. It has the marketing and institutional support that a game of its size requires.
Minecraft users sought to share their creations, and YouTube was the perfect home. In the process, they founded yet another cultural mainstay - the Minecraft YouTube channel. Around the same time, YouTube made changes to their recommendation algorithm that favored longer videos and daily uploads of content. All these met in the perfect cultural storm, and Minecraft’s popularity exploded.
After years of rewarding creators per view, the algorithm more heavily weighted total watch time, and rewarded daily uploads with consistent views. By streaming themselves playing, then repackaging the footage as long-form videos on YouTube, creators could produce hours of footage easily, and monetize both the recording and the final product. This combination of ample content and a dedicated fan base has created an entirely new breed of celebrity. Minecraft videos have bought people homes. They’ve paid whole teams’ salaries and health insurance. They’ve paid for actual children, and will one day pay for their college.
In the coming years, these “new” celebrities will become just… celebrities. eSports in particular have a funny tendency to buck criticism. Mainstream coverage of eSports loves to balk at the idea of making money off of this stuff. But true cultural shifts don’t wait for the approval of the old guard to move forward. Whether or not news anchors can believe it, video games are already the most popular form of entertainment in the world, and the industry’s market cap is larger than all films and American sports leagues combined. The culture isn’t shifting, it’s already shifted underneath our feet.
The modern video game industry, and all the content creators circling it, owe a lot to Minecraft. This little game of dirt blocks and pickaxes laid down the tracks that power players in the industry have followed since. Whatever changes come next, whatever revolutions happen next in the games industry, it will be due in part to a children’s game about digital blocks.
Thanks for reading! Let me know what you thought of this week’s post, and if you have any ideas for a future subject I should cover!
I also wanna plug my friend Gabe’s podcast Earlobe Calming - we just collaborated on an episode about Animal Crossing!