John Swan – The Rise, Fall, and Resurgence of Minecraft

It’s been over 10 years since Minecraft was conceived, and in that time it has risen to heights that no other video game has. With 176M copies sold across all its platforms and a thriving YouTube community, it really is one of a kind. But what most people don’t

Know is the story of how it came to be. How did this game get created and how did it rise to the level it has. For the next little while, I’ll be taking a deep dive into Minecraft’s history, taking to YouTube creators and a former Minecraft developer about the past

And future of this beautiful, timeless game. Game developer, Markus Alexej Persson, better known as Notch, was born on 1 June 1979 in Ystad, Sweden. Growing up, he was an obsessive Lego builder, and began programming on his father’s Commodore 128 home computer at the age of seven. He experimented with various

Programs, and he created his first game at the age of eight, a text-based adventure game. Persson never finished high school, but he had been teaching himself how to write code ever since his dad bought the Commodore, and his mother made him take an online programming

Course to boost his natural talent. This led to a programming job when he was 18, and after a few more gigs, he was hired by game development company Midasplayer in 2004. The company was later renamed to King.com, the company known titles such as Candy Crush. While employed

At King, Persson met Jakob Porsér, a fellow developer, who would go on to redefine his life path. He resigned from King in 2009 to focus on his own personal projects. On April 29 2009, a game named Infiniminer was released. This game was developed by Zach

Barth, lead developer of Zachtronics Industries, best known for their engineering puzzle and programming games. Downloading a copy of this game today, we can see many similarities to the Minecraft of today. It feels like a prototype, with much of the original controls staying the same, as well as the similarities in textures.

However, in contrast to Minecraft, this was originally created to be a multiplayer game, including such features such as a team colours, roles, and even a team bank, where the in-game currency is stored. The game has a lot of charm, and that is probably why Notch decided

That he would take the basic concept of Infinimier, and make his own game from the concept. On a Tumbr post from 2009, Notch detailed the origins of the game. “While looking through some project folders, I found an old prototype of a game that never

Quite became anything. It was called “RubyDung,” and was supposed to be a base building game inspired by Dwarf Fortress. But then I found Infiniminer. I realized that that was the game I wanted to do. I played it in multiplayer for a while and had a blast, but found it

Flawed. I thought a fantasy game in that style would work really really well, so I tried to implement a simple first person engine in that style, reusing some art and code from RubyDung.” On May 10, Notch set to work on the development of this new project, called ‘Cave Game’ at

The time, using RubyDung and Infiniminer as bases for the code. 2 days later, Notch uploaded a video called “Cave game tech test” to his private YouTube channel, Nizztoch. This video shows us a very early look at what Minecraft would become, with Physics, Lighting, and

World Generation all working. In this early version, it really does feel like Infiniminer, and ironically enough, Notch mentioned in a chat session that he was working on an Infiniminer clone, and the description of the “Cave game tech test” video mentions this as well. The

Name was changed to Minecraft: Order of the Stone, after a suggestion from a forum member, and was later shortened to just Minecraft. And then, on May 17 2009, the first ever release of Minecraft, version 0.0.10a was made public. And thus, a new era was born.

These chat logs show us a great insight into the community of Minecraft in these very early stages. The initial reception of the game was extremely positive. And one of the main things people loved about it, was that it had no purpose. And this feeling of just building,

Without much aim, is carried on in Creative Mode today. But the thing that kind of was unique about Minecraft with that it doesn’t really have that much of a direct, sort of storyline like a lot of other games do. And in 2010 or even

In 2011/2012/2013, the game was pretty much without any sort of direction there was no Ender Dragon or anything the main goal was really just to, like, mine and survive.” “The game itself never explicitly tells you what it is that you’re supposed to do

– I guess Mojang have made more of a concerted effort to amend that more recently. But like, everybody can sort of get behind the core gameplay loop of just break block, place it wherever you want. Like you can already understand the kinds of things that you can do with that

And it’s just like, it’s hard to not to like, get into it because it’s weirdly addictive as well, or at least I found it to be weirdly addictive, I wouldn’t have spent so much goddamn time playing it if I didn’t.”

But this wouldn’t be a proper look at the early stages of the game if I didn’t download it myself. So I downloaded the earliest version of the game that I could, and holy crap does it lag. This isn’t even my computer’s performance, it’s literally just the game.

The second version was exactly the same, except now we have a million Steve’s flying around everywhere. Nice. The third version of the game still had a million Steve’s flying around everywhere, but it also added support for different blocks, that you could select using the numbers on your keyboard, and the performance was completely

Fixed. The game was starting to take shape. Accounts were able to be registered on the 21st of May and an official Minecraft forum was opened on the 24th. People were registering, downloading, and playing the game, and everything was moving very fast in the development of Minecraft

On the 1st of June, Notch started a new job at Jalbum, a company that created software for managing and creating digital photo galleries. Due to his new position, Notch only had enough time to work on Minecraft part time. The development and addition of new features slowed in comparison

To before, but updates still happened. Multiplayer was added in early June, and August and October saw the addition of Survival mode taking shape. More mobs and items were added, and an official Minecraft artist was hired. However, despite the slow in development,

Sales were still happening. In December of 2009, Minecraft was given a price of 5 Euros. Notch actually kept the sales info of the game public, and we can still look at archives of this sales history using the Wayback machine. The 13th of Janurary 2010 is the first archive

We have, and according to the website, Minecraft had sold over 3607 copies, and at 5 Euros a pop, that equates to approximately 18,000 Euros. The game was certainly on the rise. “I do tend to think that it was a matter of right place, right time. Because they were

For whatever reason a ton of mining oriented games coming out, both 2D and 3D at the time. For example there’s infiniminer granted, but there was this one Xbox Live indie game released at around about the same time called Miner Dig Deep. And rather than going horizontally,

You go vertically in extremely long distance, and every single layer you discover new gems new things, very much akin to the stratification of the ores in Minecraft. And I still remember kicking around ideas involving making a 3D version of that so, it just seems like it

Was a very logical progression to have something 3D, and rather than being fixed to a given map size has a procedurally generated terrain. I think Marcus deserves a lot of credit for sort of having the foresight to realise “well this is the perfect intersection of all these features.””

The end of Janurary 2010 saw the introduction of the Crafting system, and the end of February, infinite maps were released. After a long gap of very little activity, Notch quit his job at Jalbum in May of 2010, and after a short break, continued work on Minecraft full

Time. Now, you’re probably thinking, he must have been making quite a bit to be able to sustain himself during this time. And you would be right. I’ve made up a little chart here of the Minecraft sales from Janurary 2010 to July 2010. And this is what it looks like.

Over time, Minecraft continued to grow in popularity and the frequency of updates started to increase as Notch was able to devote his full time and energy to the project. Jakob Porser and himself created the company Mojang Specifications to sell Minecraft under, but

As Persson wanted to solely develop the game and not have to worry about any administerial duties, so he hired Carl Manneh as CEO of Mojang. Over the period of June to December 2010, many items and small updates were released, including the addition of Redstone, Winter Mode,. Boats, Bricks, Fences, Slimes, Chickens,

Compasses, Sneaking, The Nether and Music Discs, with tracks composed by German composer Daniel Rosenfeld, also known as C418. On August 30, the original creepypasta for the fictional Minecraft character known as Herobrine was created. Yes I know ok, Im sorry

To break the illusion, but no code existed for Herobrine to ever exist in the game ok, I’m sorry, this is a documentary I have to be factual. In every major update, the release notes would end with ‘Removed Herobrine.’ Mojang was obviously well aware of the lore, and was playing along. Unless…

Jens Bergensten, known more commonly as Jeb, was hired on the 1st of December to work on game development for Mojang’s new game, Scrolls, although he became increasingly involved in the development of Minecraft, adding many useful features and entities. Meanwhile, people from all ages, all over the world, were purchasing accounts of this

New Indie Game. People seemed to really be drawn to the classic Pixellated Style and minimalistic charm, and in turn sales skyrocketed. “The reason is kind of caught me, is that I’m a really creative person. My entire life,

And even my entire, I guess Minecraft career or life or whatever you want to call it, I’ve always just done creative things. I haven’t always done YouTube but I’ve done basically everything you can do in the game. You know whether that’s making texture packs, or coding

Plugins, or administrating on servers, or making YouTube, or just playing survival, whatever I’ve done pretty much everything since I started playing There’s so much to the game and there’s so much you can do about the game, and one of the things I remember

Reading a couple of years ago is that they want to make Minecraft, you know, the 1000-year game or the 100-year game – it was one of those I forget which one they say, but either way they wanted to make it a game that you could play for a long time and never really

Stop enjoying. And I think that’s something that I really found is that there’s so many things you can do in Minecraft “ In late 2010 they had that discounted Alpha weekend due to some server issues. And I decided

“well this looks like an interesting game, I’ve heard a lot about it, why don’t I try it?” And I’m really fell in love with it and I still remember, to this day, remember thinking to myself, “I want to have something to do with this game at some point.”

“I think it’s quite a typical thing for people to say, but just how creative you could be with it just really did strike me, and how I can literally do whatever I wanted. And I didn’t really get that people of the Nintendo DS games that I’d been playing beforehand.

Every day it would be something new, and I would be finding out how different things worked, different aspects of the game.” “The thing that really kind of drew me into Minecraft was, I mean it really wants the graphics, because around this time, there were a lot of indie games so there was just

Going to be a lot of competition regardless. And one of them things that was really popular around this time period was the pixel, sort of retroish, graphics sort of thing. It was just kind of a standard for indie games at that point, and I’m not sure why but it just

Was. But Minecraft was unique because it had that sort of pixelated style, but it was voxel-based, which meant that it was in a 3D sort of area. Which gave, like, this really kind of new depth to the world that just really wasn’t in any other game at the time”

“I have to say it was probably because of the freedom of it. Like being from console and somebody that primarily played first person shooters and such, like free roam wasn’t really a concept that I was very familiar with and I hadn’t played many games that sort of dabbled

In that aspect of game design. Considering I was more of a first-person shooter kind of guy at the time, all of those a very linear in motion just move Point – Point B, shoot a couple guys, along the way where is Minecraft it’s just like, you just do whatever you want

Man! It was just like, a whole new concept to me and I just adored it it was so good!” “Especially in the last couple of years I just found that Minecraft is the game of like a thousand games, or more than that, Minecraft is the game of a million games where

You can just play and create games with them Minecraft. I don’t know I just think it’s crazy and the way that Minecraft even more recently with their recent update, opening up the source more to modders and things, makes it that Minecraft really can be a game

That lasts for a long time because people just make their dreams come true. It’s like the biggest Sandbox game ever. And that’s what I like about Minecraft, I mean, creativity and everything. You can do whatever you want, however you want to do it.”

“Hooray, Minecraft! We’ve created a new server, and we’re going to show people how to play Minecraft, how to survive the first night, it’s beautiful! “Oh wow, it’s terribly snowy. What on earth happened here?” “This game is beautiful.” “It is!” “Made by a single man.” “Yes.”

“I remember when I was first starting to get into the community, it wasn’t really so much that I was like “playing the game” or anything like that, it was really just through YouTube. And I remember my first experiences with Minecraft was when I watched the Yogscast,

Lewis and Simon, play the game. They were just a huge part of me growing up and just getting involved in video games in general. And, you know, their Minecraft Let’s Plays were pretty much the only thing that I watch for months and months, until eventually I

Just sort of got sick of them and started moving on to other people.” “The first YouTube videos I watched of Minecraft, were from the Yogscast. Which their channel was then called BlueXephos, but now it’s renamed the Yogscast. But they had a roleplay series

Called Shadow of Israphel, which followed both Simon and Lewis as they explored the world of Minecraft. That was back in, like, alpha, but I think I started watching that around 2011/201?” The Let’s Play community was most assuredly the force that drove Minecraft to it’s peak,

With top YouTubers such as The Yogscast, SkyDoesMinecraft, CaptainSparkles, thediamondminecart, stampylonghead, BAJANCANADIAN, iBallisticSquid, JeromeASF and more, all contributing to the popularity of the game. This community was so integral to my and so many other people’s starts with the game, and I surely wouldn’t have found out about it if they didn’t exist. But these

Creators didn’t just play vanilla Minecraft, but modifications and extensions of Minecraft as well. Because the game is so open to changes through it source, Modpacks, Adventure Maps, and things like Muliplayer Minigames were all able to be created. I still remember the

Nights I spent watching the Yogscast playing The Dropper and following the long and complicated story of the Yogscast Jaffa Factory, watching the different perspectives from the different channels in the story. And for me and the viewers that wanted something else to watch,

And a change from the rather basic and rudimentary stages of vanilla, these mods and extensions added so much more to the game, and allowed the lets play community to flourish. “Which YouTube I remember specifically like some of the people that I would watch were

People like SkyDoesMinecraft, SethBling, AntVenom, there was a Minecraft mod reviewer named ipodmail who I used to watch quite a bit as well. There was of course CaptainSparklez, I mean, how could you not. And I remember somebody, another YouTuber who went by the name of Kuledud3,

With like a ‘k’ at their start of their name and a ‘3’ as the e at the end,Please contact I really loved it the time, they made primarily like, Minecraft machinimas, and I remember I was a donator on their Minecraft server and I spent so much time playing on

That server. It’s inhuman how much time I spend playing on that one server.” “I think the coolest part about Minecraft is all of the Minecraft mods. That is the reason why it has such a huge presence on YouTube and why the game itself is so popular,

Because people love watching that custom content. Just seeing stuff in Minecraft that can’t be done, is like a huge thing. That’s definitely were found my success. Like Minecraft Mods they like seeing stuff that can’t be done in Minecraft that this mod let’s you do, you know?”

But not only did this openness allow for people to find new ways of watching Minecraft, but it also allowed people with different talents and abilities to get involved with the community. Through mod and texturepack creation, or even just building structures on servers, everyone had something in the community that they could contribute to.

“Absolutely, that is one of the reasons that I think contributes to the longevity of the Java version at least. It’s sort of allows,I don’t want to say everybody, but yeah, it allows everybody to be a creator, at least anybody who has the capability of

Learning Java which is not too terribly difficult a language. But it’s not only that. The fact that there’s the block model system allows people to become independent artists, you can swap our texture packs, people can contribute to the game by making their own texture packs,

And then by making adventure maps. There are so many ways that individual members of the community can actually be a part of the game. And I think that is very much a part of why the game has had such a long lifetime.”

Well I do think that openness is probably one of the biggest things that did kind of catapult it, I think that if you’re talking about how it ended up becoming big I think that had a big thing to do with YouTube. Minecraft told us that their music was non-copyright,

The whole soundtrack was non-copyright, you can use it any videos if you want to. And what helped Minecraft kind of greatly was that Minecraft was, like, the biggest thing on YouTube 6 years ago. And I think that helped Minecraft kind of grow, but I think the reason

It kind of kept growing is that creative aspect that most of the games don’t have. you know they’ll let you do basically anything, basically anything you want in terms of modifications, in terms of skins, in terms of look, and feel, and sounds, and whatever you want to change

About the game you can change about the game whether that’s through development, or just changing textures or whatever.” “Yeah I certainly think it’s helped the a community in a way, and it’s also kept people playing the game as well. I know I went through a phase of constantly adding new mods and

Texture packs and things like that, data packs, to the game because I just thought, more stuff is good you know. And especially when it might change the whole thing entirely, it feels great to explore new methods of playing. Similarly to how they’re doing the new updates and stuff

It changes the way the game is played, in a sense. And I think it’s encouraged communities as well, at the same time, with like modding communities, and different people creating different texture packs and having fun with them and things like that.”

“Stuff like mods, texture packs, well now resource packs, that definitely adds a lot more to the game. I mean if you’re bored of just playing Minecraft just download like Tekkit or something and then you’ve got like a thousand more things that you can experiment with!”

During this time, the price of MC increased to 15 Euros, and on January 1st, Minecraft surpassed 1M sales. It’s safe to say that Mojang was rolling in it. The community on YouTube continued to grow and the Minecraft Dev team was working hard to release the first

Official version of the game. Up till now, all of the releases I’ve mentioned have been Beta or Alpha. On March the 4th, the official soundtrack of the game, composed by C418 was released. When I was playing the old versions of MC without the music in research for this

Documentary, I can say that the game felt dead. The ambient but interesting melodies of Minecraft add so much more to the game, and if you’re interested, there’s a dedicated video by talented creator named Doco on the Music of Minecraft. There’s a reason we can

Hear 5 seconds of Sweden and can immediately tell it’s from Minecraft. The music is iconic, and there’s no other game soundtrack quite like it. However, in the meantime, some other Minecraft music was traversing the YouTube space.

♫ 10 blocks is the magical total ♫ ♫ As that’s enough to build up my portal ♫ ♫ Moving to the Nether ♫ ♫ I’m moving to the Nether ♫ ♫ I’m moving to the Nether ♫ I have to say, watching all these parodies and Minecraft original songs brought so many

Memories. This was my childhood, and most likely, it was yours too. And for good reason. These songs were bangers. My personal favourites were always Fallen Kingdom by *CaptainSparklez, and Diggy Diggy Hole by the Yogscast. ♫ Born underground, suckled from a teet of stone ♫

♫ Raised in the dark, the safety of our mountain home ♫ Watching all these videos made me long for a time gone by. A time when things were simpler. A time when I could just sit on my bed at 9pm on a cool summers night playing Minecraft

On my Intel Atom school laptop. It’s like I didn’t have a care in the world back then, and this documentary has made me nostalgic above all else. Pocket edition was revealed by Mojang’s business developer David Kaplan, or Kappische, on the

25th of May 2011 in a blog post on the Mojang website. It included a video of Kaplan playing Minecraft on a Sony Xperia Play, and a few days later at the E3 conference, Mojang showed off this new gaming experience, as well as showcasing the upcoming Xbox 360 release of

The game. On August 16, Minecraft Pocket Edition was oficially launched for the Xperia Play exclusively, and the first edition for iOS was released on the 18th of November. Because Minecraft was being made available on so many platforms, it catapolted the game’s popularity,

And allowed more and more people to play – not just at home, but also on the go. The game was moving into people’s lives faster than any other game at the time, and has Minecraft passed 10 million registered users back in July, it was certainly becoming a household

Name. So what was about to come next should come as no surprise. “A sandbox seemingly endless. An adventure that had everyone saying, ‘just one more block.’” “Are you ready for the official release of Minecraft?!” sigh cringe. Minecon 2011, the very first Minecraft convention was, by all accounts,

Not the most well organised event ever. But it did bring almost 5000 attendees to Mandalay Bay, Las Vegas, Nevada, to watch keynote speeches, take part in building contests, costume contests, view exhibits, and meet worldwide Minecraft personalities such as the Yogscast. Minecon also coincided with the official release of the game.

There was a small incident that happened after Minecon where Notch rage tweeted the Yogscast, alleging a lot of not so very nice things about them. Notch apologized later and called it a misunderstanding. Overall though, Minecon was a success and it set up a long line of future Minecon conventions to come.

I’m gonna be honest. The next few years of Minecraft history are pretty uneventful. Updates came and went. Minecon came, “Um, can you do the Gangnam Style?” and went. And came, “Um, I was wondering, um. What’s the weccomended amount of dedd-ddicated wam I should have to a server?”

And went. Now, rather than bore you with heaps of boring talk about updates, I reckon we should do a quickfire round. Here are all the updates to Minecraft from 1.1 to 1.8. 1.1. We now have spawn eggs. We can spawn mobs with an egg. Very cool. We also have

Superflat worlds, so now we have worlds that are super flat. We also have beaches. 1.2. Lots of new stuff like Jungle biomes, Desert wells, Mineshafts, Chiseled Stone Bricks, Redstone Lamps, Bottle o’ Enchanting, Fire Charge, Iron Golems and Ocelots. Vines can

Now be climbed like ladders, and Snow golems will melt and die in the Nether. I didn’t know about that one, I may actually have to try that out. In between this and the next update, Minecraft for the Xbox 360 was released.

1.3. We now have emeralds and trading with villagers. Both things that I have never used in my life, but here we are. We also have ender chests, tripwire, wooden slabs, sandstone stairs and wooden stairs. We also have books, golden apples, desert villages, desert pyramids and jungle pyramids.

1.4. We now have command blocks, beacons, anvils, flower pots, item frames, cobblestone walls, mob heads, wooden buttons, potatoes, carrots, carrot on a stick, pumpkin pie, nether stars, potion of night vision and potion of invisibility. We also have the Wither which

I definitely don’t hate, wither skeletons, witches and bats. In between this and the next update, Minecraft for the Raspberry Pi was released. 1.5. Heaps of redstone stuff. Activator rails, Block of redstone, daylight sensors, droppers, hoppers, redstone comparators, trapped chests, weighted pressure plates, nether brick, nether

Quatrz and all the decorative blocks that come with it, minecarts with hoppers, spawners and TNT. 1.6. We now have Horses, Donkeys, Mules, horse armour, name tags and leads. hay bales, carpets, hardened clay, stained clay and block of coal.

1.7 is called The Update that Changed the World, and for good reason. We now have stained glass in all 16 colours, acasia and dark oak wood, Packed ice, podzol, red sand, new flowers, pufferfish, Salmon, Clownfish. We have a range of new biomes, including the Mesa, Savanna,

Sunflower Plains, Foored Forest, Bitch Forest, Flower Forest, the Taiga, the Mega Taiga, Extreme Hills+ and Deep Ocean. We also have the Amplified World type which will kill your computer. In between this and the next update, Minecraft for the PS3 was released. 1.8 added Diorite, Andesite, Granite, Coarse dirt, prismarine, Prismarine bricks, Dark

Prismarine, Red sandstone, Iron trapdoors, Sea lanterns, Wet sponge, Slime blocks, Banners, Barriers, Armor stands, Rabbits, and Ocean Monuments. And with these came Endermites, Guardians, Elder Guardians. But just a few days after this update, news arrived that would shock everyone.

After a few months of speculation, on September 15, an announcement in a blog post on the Mojang website stated that Mojang, and subsequently Minecraft were being acquired by Microsoft for 2.5 Billion Dollars. “Yes, the deal is real. Mojang is being bought by Microsoft.

It was reassuring to see how many of your opinions mirrored those of the Mojangstas when we heard the news. Change is scary, and this is a big change for all of us. It’s going to be good though. Everything is going to be OK.

Please remember that the future of Minecraft and you – the community – are extremely important to everyone involved. If you take one thing away from this post, let it be that. As you might already know, Notch is the creator of Minecraft and the majority shareholder

At Mojang. He’s decided that he doesn’t want the responsibility of owning a company of such global significance. Over the past few years he’s made attempts to work on smaller projects, but the pressure of owning Minecraft became too much for him to handle. The only option was to sell Mojang.

Minecraft will continue to evolve, just like it has since the start of development. We don’t know specific plans for Minecraft’s future yet, but we do know that everyone involved wants the community to grow and become even more amazing than it’s ever been. Stopping players making cool stuff is not in anyone’s interests.”

The reaction to this announcement was very mixed, with many people skeptical about how Microsoft was going to run the company and worrying if they were going to make any destructive changes to the game that everyone had fallen in love with for the past 5 years. And for

The most part, that hasn’t come to fruition on the Java version at least. The Bedrock edition on Windows 10 is a bit of a different story. “When Microsoft bought Minecraft, everyone was freaking out, everyone was thinking “oh Microsoft’s going to ruin the game, it’s not going to be fun anymore, they’re going to

Add loads of garbage to it.” But, I think everyone’s kind of forgotten that Microsoft own Mojang now, because it’s still basically the same game; ok maybe there’s Minecraft Windows 10, which even simple stuff like resource packs, or custom maps, you have to pay for

That on the Windows 10 Edition. But the Java edition has always stayed like, you can get any resource pack, install any mod, install any custom map, and you can just do whatever you want. Whereas, I think with the Windows 10 Edition they’ve made it more about ‘well

We have to have microtransactions because this is a business.’” “Ever since Microsoft took Minecraft, they seem to have made more of an effort to try and move over to the Bedrock Edition as much as possible, which is the addition where they

Can monetize everything. And it almost, almost feels as though they’re trying their hardest to phase out Java as much as possible. Because you can never really get bored of Java, that’s where all the mods are, that’s where you can just do whatever you want whenever you want,

But if they have complete control of the platform then they can do whatever they want and more or less get away with it. And I guess I’m partially concerned about that.” “Personally I don’t feel that Microsoft has really had much of an impact on the development

Of the game outside of expanding the purview of the game itself. I mean they’ve enabled things like the Bedrock cross-play Between Windows 10 and Xbox one. They’ve expanded the number of ports, the number of systems to which the game has been ported. But ultimately,

The impression that I get is that Microsoft is sort of just a company that cares a lot about the IP, and they’re willing to put their copious amounts of funding to help ensure that the IP stays as awesome as it has been.”

“I understand that they need to make money somehow, especially with the introduction of Minecoins and things, it wasn’t a good way to introduce ways of getting money from people. But I also think that, at first at least, they didn’t quite understand what people

Were wanting from the game, as seen in the 1.9 combat update. Half people loved it, most people didn’t. “That’s one thing that I think that the new Minecraft games on Bedrock Edition is kind of missing is that they’re putting some stuff like that behind a payment wall. They’re

Putting skins behind a payment wall, they’re putting Maps behind a payment wall. I think that could lead to the fall of Minecraft maybe, but I hope not. But I think that’s something that Minecraft kind of hits home too is that they don’t have those things behind a payment

Wall, it’s one payment and then you just do whatever you want. After Microsoft’s acquisition, Minecraft started to see a steady decline in popularity, although it is unlikely that the acquisition was the main cause of this downfall. Rather, the game

Had become stale and boring for the primary people who played it. The hype died down, and a lot of that had to do with the YT community becoming more sparse over time, with many prominent figures leaving Minecraft in the pursuit of other games. It also had to do

With a major oversaturation of the genre, where every kid and his dog thought they could become the next Minecraft YouTube sensation. Not my proudest moment. As Microsoft acquired Moajang, they transformed the name of Minecraft from a game, into a brand. Incorporating merchandise

With Microsoft’s worldwide reach, the game was everywhere, all over the world. The merchandise for Minecraft is just everywhere, like I feel it’s inescapable at this point. Wherever I go there’s like a Minecraft annual, a Minecraft calendar, Minecraft baby pig plush,

Minecraft posters. You know it’s just everywhere, it’s such a mainstream thing now. Like I see little children walking around with a Minecraft Creeper t-shirt on and it just reminds me like MINECRAFT, like I’m constantly thinking about it.” This corporate transition definitely contributed to the over saturation of the game, and the

Rise of cringey 9 year olds picking it up, establishing a culture of disdain around it and the people who played it. Although as I stated before, Microsoft’s acquisition was not the sole or even the main reason for the game going out of fashion – that had mostly

To do with the community at the time. The game would continue to fall in popularity over the coming years, and according to Google Trends, hit an all time low of 26% of the peak interest in Mid September 2018, just about the time where a certain popular Battle

Royale game was hitting its peak. This remained fairly stable until Mid April of 2019, when something started to change. Around April 21 2019, the Google trends data for Minecraft has a bit of an upswing, before drastically moving upwards. At first, there seemed to be no logical reason for Minecraft’s

Apparent resurgence. But with the release of the new updates, namely the 1.13 Aquatic update and the 1.14 Villiage and Pillage update, many players, and maybe more importantly, YouTubers started to come back to the game, such as veteran SkyDoesMinecraft, now renamed

To SkyDoesEverything. These influx in Minecraft videos likely sent a message to the YouTube algorithm, leading to more recommendations of this content and people rediscovering the game. Because, by this point, the game had been loaded with so many more features and

Opportunities, that playing it felt fun again. Microsoft was clearly trying to cram as many things into updates as they could, and it paid off. Another main force in the Minecraft resurgence was undoubtedly CallMeCarson’s SMP Live, a Twitch streaming series of Minecraft which started in Mid March 2019, incorporating relatebale and charismatic personalities in

A multiplayer survival type setting. It was a winning formula, and saw a great rise in viewership around April, which definitely contributed to the resurgence of the game. “I guess a more recent resurgence of Minecraft that has occurred has a lot to do with memes.

You know people like Dolan Dark and Grandayy. It was pretty trendy to trash on Minecraft, it was treated a lot like Fortnite is now back in like 2015/2016. And a lot of these popular meme channels liked to make memes dunking on it – you know making fun of the

YouTubers that did it calling them sellouts, because most of the popular YouTubers at the time were Minecraft YouTubers. And over time though these sort of satirical memes became more and more unironic. And as with the emergence of Fortnite, people started realise that Minecraft

Is, you know, this very solid game that doesn’t have microtransactions. And I think a lot of people have kind of wanted to go back to that time where, you know, they didn’t have to worry about anything and could just play Minecraft all the time.”

“I do think that PewDiePie had a major impact in it kind of rising to the top, but I do think he kind of came in while it was already rising so I don’t think he’s the reason it

Kind of came back. But I do think he helped, kind of, maintain it for longer and helped it to peak even higher, because obviously he’s the biggest YouTuber on the planet and him playing Minecraft is a huge deal But I do think that the main reason is that it has

To do with YouTube again, I think that if you look at YouTube charts and YouTube analytics and stuff, Minecraft kind of took off again on YouTube. I’m not if they changed their algorithm, I’m not sure what it was – I think it has a lot to do with the fact that Minecraft

Is kind of in this sweet spot where you can do whatever you want in it, so you can play multiple different types of games or whatever, easily make the video over 10 minutes, easily don’t curse, there’s nothing violent about it, you’re not going to get demonetized. And

I think that could have had a impact potentially too on Minecraft coming back. YouTube I think again is a major, major reason.” “It’s very difficult to explain but it’s just something that you feel like you can

Always rely on to be able to go back to. The majority of other games, you’d feel the same way every time you play it, whereas with Minecraft, you can explore something else, and I guess it would be a different experience almost every time.”

“Well I think that the nostalgia for the game is helped a lot with its recent resurgence, because obviously it was really popular, and then I think it was still fairly popular but then again recently, obviously this year it’s kind of peaked again. I think since a lot

Of people like, me and you when they were fairly young, played it and have fun memories and the Nostalgia for the game, and apart from quite a lot of new updates, the core game mechanics and basic crafting recipes are still the same, I think it’s easy for

An old player like me to come back and just play some good old Minecraft like the olden times back like when I was a kid. So I think nostalgia helps with it a lot. “I would say there are multiple reasons why the game is so enduring. First of all

Is extensible, or at least the Java version is through modding. There’s robust support for the Bedrock versions through map packs and minigames. And I know this analogy has been made before but I would say that it is a boundless map of virtual LEGO really. I

Mean when we were all kids, it was always easier to expand LEGO creations outward than upward, and so that’s why in a way the fact that in Minecraft you can move on the horizontal plane pretty much infinitely whereas there’s still some vertical limit to it, I think that

Kind of makes it very analogous to the sort of LEGO creations that kids would make back in the day. Minecraft is truly a one of a kind game. A game that has seen many twists and turns in

Its story. A game that was created by one man, but has risen to become the best selling video game of all time. A game that carries so much nostalgia for so many people. A game that has never stopped growing. A game that never dies. You can’t say that about many

Other titles. And that is why Minecraft is so unique, and why it will never stop growing. Will Minecraft be the 100 year brand? Maybe not. But I know it’s left a mark on me, that I will remember for the rest of my life. Thank you very much for watching. And I’ll see you

Next time.