EGO – Love letter to Minecraft.

Minecraft is one of the most popular video games of all time. Maybe even now, the one that stands at the very top of the video game world. It is the best-selling game in the history of video games. It’s a game with a community of over a hundred million active users.

For more than ten years, the game has been breaking all possible records. People have been playing it for over ten years. Meetings and conventions have been organized for over ten years. The game has been evolving for over ten years, that it attracts new players, that it makes the old ones stay,

That it gives the biggest content creators billions of views on Twitch and YouTube. For more than ten years, it has fascinated, obsessed and made people dream, that it drives individuals of all ages and nationalities crazy. For more than ten years it has been gathering a huge community of enthusiasts,

The hundreds of millions of curious people who have been tempted by its very simple concept. And if you don’t know the concept, I can show you what it looks like. You create a new world and you get there. There are blocks. The whole world is a big pile of blocks…

That form… there, a forest. I’m not sure where I am but I’m there. You look around and when you get there for the first time, you don’t really know what to do and maybe you don’t understand why the game is popular.

Perhaps, you tell yourselves that, after all, this game is indeed a child’s game. A digital sandbox that obsesses people simply because it is accessible. Except that when you get there, you don’t see what’s on the other side. On the other side of this forest, first of all.

On the other side of the game, more specifically. You don’t see what we can build. A house, for example, some stone walls, a nice garden… That’s not bad at all. And why not a big house, a small vegetable garden, a stable, a pond? Maybe you were imagining that. But you probably can’t imagine…

This or that or that. Huge cities, huge detailed structures, furnished, original, creative. Buildings that stand next to each other without trampling each other, honest baptizers, luxurious houses, streets that crisscross, squares lined with stalls … And you know what? People will always build bigger, always more sublime. Alone or in a group.

Groups that can gather dozens, hundreds of individuals organized in a platoon of determined artists. People will always want to build more, the real, the invented. People will build everything. Like this group of enthusiasts who set out to simply reproduce, to scale, the whole earth. But it goes beyond that, of course.

People create, they sculpt, statues of men, animals, mythical creatures, sometimes in just one statue, sometimes by tens, which follow one another and which form a whole. That, for example, stop-motion animations. They reproduce in 3D with a parallax effect, the painting ‘Starry Night’ of Van Gogh. They create huge vertical and horizontal tunnels,

Whose rapid crossing seems to set in motion the precisely modelled patterns by the hands of passionate people who simply want to offer us a nice show. They hike, lay tens of millions of blocks on the other side of the world so that the cards they represent from above,

Form huge and extremely detailed drawings. And if the art doesn’t move you, check this out. Look at these red threads. They carry within them the Minecraftian equivalent of electricity which is usually used to open a door remotely, to move a block, perhaps, to switch on a light. Come on, you know what?

Ten lights that form a beautiful path and perhaps illuminate the corridor that connects two of your buildings. But obviously, things don’t stop there. People tinker, they obviously make everything. Safes, transport circuits, automated farms. Take a look. Food is harvested. And then they can, if you want, be harvested automatically and placed in safes.

And if you want to sort them out, there you go, go back and do it. All you have to do is build it. People create airplanes or huge structures that can completely wipe out a landscape. And then always further, with several million blocks, closed and open circuits, timers, logic gates.

They create calculators capable of addition and multiplication. And then, always further, they set up huge computers with a circuit so complex that it is necessary to fly several minutes to cover all the extent. Without understanding the huge network of cables and logic gates, just amazed by the ingenuity of the individuals

Who have created a real computer in a game. Until we finally manage to close the loop with a computer capable of running Minecraft. And that’s just with the blocks available in the game. Minecraft is a big piece of code, very malleable. If people would have stayed ten years on an unmodified game,

Just imagine how much time they will spend learning that for years, are coded by amateurs, mods of all kinds that can do everything. Change the look of the game like this, like this, like this or that allow you to add things. Whatever you want, animals, creatures, equipment, structures,

Dimensions, systems, sometimes completely different games. You can make anything out of Minecraft. Transform 3D animations into real time animation, transpose yourself with Kinect directly into the game… And if you don’t know how to do it, no worries. Launch YouTube, search for what you want,

You will find 100 different tutorials to make a door. People want to share, people want to show. People want to learn and teach, and that’s why they don’t play alone. Not always, anyway. That’s why there are hundreds of thousands of servers on which people play with their friends

Or make some, on servers of strangers or on the biggest servers of the game that always accumulate, years after their opening, hundreds of thousands of active users who take turns at all hours of the day and all hours of the night to bring these worlds to life,

To show the heat of their amusement. That’s it. You see, I told you in front of this forest that we didn’t know what was behind it. And everything I’ve told you about makes this game truly fabulous. But that’s not why I’m staying. Believe me, I am very impressed, sometimes even intimidated

By the creativity and perseverance of Minecraft players. Believe me, I am a fan. But I never did any of that. What makes me stay is not all that. What makes me stay, you can enjoy with me. Can you hear that music?

And for many of you, you feel the same way I do, I think. And it’s not the only one, by the way, to give me this effect in this game. A lot of the original music of Minecraft moves me. It’s very strange, what it produces. At the top of the list is nostalgia.

I think. It reminds me of the emotions I felt when I started playing the game and then when I spent a thousand hours on it. And not a thousand hours spent building huge structures like the enthusiasts I was telling you about earlier. It’s a thousand hours spent doing little things,

Thousand hours spent collecting wood, thousand hours spent making tools. First in wood, then in stone. A thousand hours spent digging, to go underground to find a cave. And then to explore, to put torches timidly on a wall, on the ground to help me in my research.

A thousand hours spent running from the monsters waiting for me in the underground. A thousand hours spent mining the materials I was lucky enough to stumble upon and then to come out, to get away from the darkness. A thousand hours spent building a house,

A small house already, since I didn’t know how to do it. And then I watched people who knew how to do it. I learned. I started building bigger houses, with exposed beams and relief. A thousand hours spent making a small vegetable garden surrounded by fences to avoid being trampled on.

A thousand hours spent going around the house, of my small property to place the torches that will keep the monsters away, who would inevitably have come to disturb me. A thousand hours spent bringing in chickens, cows and sheep, to attract them with hay and seeds.

Crossing jungles and rivers to bring these animals to safety that I will take care of when I get home. This little home, lit up in the night who, in this immense world of which I am the only inhabitant, represents everything. That’s Minecraft for me. An ocean of the unknown that I cross alone

To recover resources, get hold of objects, kill monsters, escape from them when they are too numerous, discover new places and then finally return home. And the next world will be the same. A frightening world in which I will advance alone and a forest in which it will be very dark.

Then I will turn back and between two trees, I will see it, my home. It is a little different than the previous one. Look, the house is bigger, I have two fields and a small stream, but this is my home. That’s it. For me, that’s the magic of this game.

To come back to this little house that I sweated to build, by keeping monsters away, collecting every resource, placing every block. All this while listening to this music. Thanks to Minecraft and thanks to all the people who accompanied me

In the dozens of games I’ve been able to launch over the past ten years. And thank you for watching this video. I wanted to do something very simple for the hundred thousand subscribers. The speedrun was indeed effective. It took us less than five months and I couldn’t have wished for more. Now…

Two hundred thousand, can we do it even faster? We’ll see about that. In the meantime, take care and I’ll see you soon.