The Story of MinecraftForFree.com

If you were looking to play minecraft for the first time sometime between 2011 and 2012 but you just didn’t want to pay well you probably stumbled upon this website minecraftforfree.com at the time it was the most popular minecraft pirating website all you had to do was click on

The website agree to a disclaimer and bam you were playing the full version of minecraft no strings attached but one day the site simply vanished without a trace so what really happened to minecraftforfree.com well this story is just crazy so let’s get right into this on december 12 2010 the domain from

Minecraftforfree.com was registered and not much later did the site go live it was created by a user named dylan who would actually end up becoming a member of team abolition a minecraft briefing team now the interesting thing about this website is that it wasn’t just a clone of minecraft but it was the

Complete actual game playable in your web browser within seconds how is this even possible well a few things first off in minecraft’s early days playing the full game within your browser was actually a completely normal thing fully supported by mojang they even gave you the option to play in your browser on

Minecraft.net as a java applet as a result of this it was extremely trivial to simply copy the whole game onto another website and remove the paywall the only issue that this would cause is that you wouldn’t be able to join servers because you weren’t actively logged into a minecraft account but it

Was still essentially the entire game so people simply not wanting to pay for minecraft flocked to minecraftforfree.com when you’d visit the site for the first time you’d be greeted with a disclaimer explaining that the owners of the site can’t be held responsible for it and that it’s for educational or demonstrational

Purposes only now i just don’t understand why this disclaimer was even here in the first place obviously copying the entirety of minecraft and making it free is illegal and i don’t see how this disclaimer gives them any legal backing for this website but either way the site did stay

Online for almost two years until one day in 2012 dylan the website creator received an email at four in the morning it was from notch and he was pissed unfortunately the original email was lost to time but while interviewing storm surge another member of team abolition he told me that

The email went something like this take down minecraft for free immediately you will be hearing from my lawyers notch was obviously not happy especially given the fact that minecraft for free was listed very high in google search results there was actually one point where if you search terms like minecraft

For free or free minecraft the website would literally be at the top of the list even above the actual minecraft website so dylan immediately told storm about the email he got from notch something had to be done quickly before he received a lawsuit at his doorstep

And that’s when storm got an idea now this is where things get absolutely insane so stick with me a few months prior to all of this the game publisher bethesda attempted to sue mojing over their new game called scrolls they claimed that by mojing naming their games scrolls it infringed on their

Copyright over the elder scrolls series now this is of course absolutely ridiculous you can’t just copyright a word so after some back and forth between bethesda notch came up with a pretty unique idea challenge the best three from bethesda and mojing to a game of quake 3. whoever

Wins keeps the rights to scrolls he was serious but bethesda backed down on the offer and eventually the case was dropped anyways so how does this relate to the minecraft for free situation well dylan and storm knew that the site had to go down no matter what but just to up

The ante storm told dylan to reply to the email challenging notch to a game of quake 3 notch’s best 3 vs team evolution’s best 3. if team evolution wins they get minecraft capes if mojing wins team evolution would have to hire a dubstep artist to make a song in notch’s

Honor this offer was obviously insane and dylan was skeptical about sending this as he didn’t want to get sued and had no context at the time about the mojang bethesda lawsuit but storm told dylan to trust him on this and send it so he did and what’s shocking is that 10 minutes later

Notch responds accepting the challenge and about a week later notch and jeb got into a match of quake 3 with team evolution notch even live streamed the match publicly while storm recorded it and uploaded it to the team abolition youtube channel both are actually still watchable to this day now here’s the

Thing at the time notch had no idea of team appellation’s existence and thought he was just battling random people that pirated minecraft so when notch’s live stream viewers saw the usernames he was playing with the chat went insane some viewers were very mad that he was giving this griefing team attention others

Cheered them on now notch wasn’t looking at the stream chat so he still had no clue but he did eventually realize and was cool with it in the end anyways notch’s team ended up winning probably because it was dylan’s first time ever playing quake so the capes were a no-go

And storm had to hire a dubstep artist to create a song for notch the song was appropriately titled But the fact notch accepted a challenge like this over blatant plagiarism of his game is just awesome maybe one day they’ll have a rematch then notch can prove his quake honor once again after all of this minecraftforfree.com was taken down forever clones of the website were of course made but they were also

Short-lived mainly because mojang officially dropped support for playing minecraft in a web browser once patch 1.6 was released and soon after that all in-browser java applets stopped being supported entirely and the functionality was removed from most major web browsers like chrome and firefox this made any websites that still hosted a free

Version of minecraft effectively useless so that’s the story of minecraftforfree.com it was short-lived but it had a pretty incredible ending if you asked me