Imagine it’s 2011 and you’re at an indie games awards ceremony, not as a nominee, or even a guest actually, but as a volunteer helping out at the back of the room. Up on stage, Notch has just accepted his second award of the evening, the Grand Prize, for His work on Minecraft. A game that was already breaking all sorts of records. Now imagine, as you stand there, right at the back, that not too long ago you created the game credited as being the the inspiration for Minecraft’s now iconic, blocky design. Aghhhhhh. It’s just, like, it’s just awful. And so, like, it’s was just years and years and years of this. Of feeling, like… Of feeling bad. That was Zach Barth, the creator of Infiniminer, a game of procedurally-generated, block-filled landscapes, in which you mine for resources and build things. The similarities aren’t so difficult to spot, are they? And Notch has, on multiple occasions, pointed to Infiniminer as being the catalyst that led to him creating Minecraft in the way that he did. But don’t get me wrong, this isn’t the story of how some Nordic man in a hat stole Zach Barth’s idea and his future, and how, just a few years later, it shouldv’e been him selling his games studio for two and a half billion dollars. That’s not it. That’s not what we’re talking about And Zach is often the first to point this out. No instead, this is the story of what it’s like to have created something that’s so undeniably adjacent to what has become the most successful video game of all time. “It’s not like I felt this was a direct ripoff of my game, it’s not a clone, it’s very clearly not a clone. All the tree punching shit, I never would have done in any game, but I’m still feeling bad about it, inexplicably.” Imagine every time Minecraft hits a new milestone, and that’ll happen a lot over the years, someone close to you: a friend, a family member, a peer, gets in touch to say: “Hey, have you seen this? How do you feel about that? Are you okay?” “At first it was just like, whatever, that’s a different thing. But like, very quickly, the story in the Barth household becomes: Oh why didn’t you do that? Nobody was consciously saying it, it’s just out there, right? Like I’m unsure, I’m not confident, I don’t Know what the deal happened. The narrative just kind of becomes: oh, that could have been you. You could have made that game.” And it’s easy to imagine how a thought like that might fester. Zach had been playing around With this idea of games that allowed you to create content for them, as you played, since college. In fact, Infiniminer was technically the fifth, or maybe sixth game — not all of them were finished, so it gets a little confusing — in something Zach likes to call the Infinifranchise. The first, Infinitron, was actually a tabletop game, in which players would create their units and even the terrain itself, from scratch, as they played. The rules are still publicly available, although Zach himself admits to having only played it once and in his words: “it lasted 8 hours, And I’m pretty sure everyone was unhappy by the end”. Still though, if you’re looking for the seed that started this whole thing, you can find it here, in this rulesheet. There was actually a planned sequel to Infinitron, by the way, called – and I kid you not – Infinicraft. Although this quick sketch is about as far as Zach got with its design. That name though… Soon enough, the Infinifranchise would switch over to video games, starting with Infinifrag. “Around this time was when RTS/FPS hybrids were popular. And when I say popular.. It was when they were like, a thing.” Zach wanted to take that concept and bring it into his series of games in which players were creating things as they play, and so he thinks: what if the RTS portion wasn’t just about placing buildings and structures on the map, but also designing them from scratch. Anyway, one day he finds himself talking about this idea with a friend of his, Keith Holman. “And I think he misunderstood what I was describing and he’s like: oh, what if you place the blocks, instead of in this UI, but like, just by where you’re looking at them.” And so, Infinifrag drops the RTS bits altogether, but holds onto the idea of building bases as you play, albeit now entirely in first-person. Its sequel, which was never finished, had Zach experimenting with procedurally-generated worlds and even different biomes. Look at these images and tell me you don’t understand The link between this series of games and Minecraft. Oh my god. Anyway, if we jump forwards to 2009, Zach has now graduated college and is working for Microsoft, not developing games, but on the team that does Office, where he’s feeling A little creatively stifled. And so, of course, in his free time, he’s still tinkering away on various video game projects, one of which will become Infiniminer. “I was playing TF2 and Motherload, and I’d made Infinifrag. And so I was like, I’m going to combine all of these things together and make a competitive, team-based, violent mining game, where you mine this procedural world. Zach’s blog from the time is still archived and so you can see how quickly this game started To take shape. This is the very first screenshot he shared, in the February of 2009, along with the description: “It’s a game about mining, and building, and blocks – lots of blocks!!” Two months later and the game is freely available for anyone to download. Back then Zach didn’t Think about selling his games, mostly because he didn’t realise that was even an option. Big studios sell games, right? Not individuals. And I mean, who would want to pay money for a game about mining, that’s mostly been created by a single person? That wouldn’t be popular for at least another… six months. And so yeah, the game goes live on Zach’s site and I asked him about the initial reaction he received from players: “People liked it and they immediately started getting really into it and then turning it into things that they wanted it to be. Which, for me, was really confusing because it’s like: Wait, hold on, I make games because I want to make the stuff that I want it to be.” In Zach’s mind, Infiniminer was meant to be that competitive, team-based, violent mining game which he’d first envisioned, but it very quickly started evolving into something Else. It wasn’t just that players were ignoring his rules, although they were doing that too, they were also fundamentally changing the game. You see, Zach didn’t have the experience he has now and had released Infiniminer in a way that made it very easy to hack. “And that really kind of freaked me out. I can’t even authoritatively do anything with the game. I can change it, but then if somebody else has more popular changes, they can just take off and become the real version of Infiniminer.” This was all new to Zach and he didn’t much like it. Eventually, he figured you know what? Let’s at least make this official, and by May of that year, Infiniminer was released as open-source, meaning that now anyone could access its code and propose changes, but at least they’d Be encouraged to return to Zach’s site to do that. “My previous games, there was never any reason to do that. But Infiniminer, the whole building thing really captured people’s imaginations in such a compelling way that they wanted to be able to do their own shit with it. That was very much foreshadowing Everything that would come after, I suppose, right? It was too good of an idea!” Despite it becoming open source, Zach’s enthusiasm for this quickly waned and a month later, he’d even go as far as announcing that he was done making games entirely. In retrospect, he tells me, this was more about lashing out than anything else and he’d take it all back about a month later, but he was done with Infiniminer, that was over. And so Zach did what he always had and promptly moved onto the next idea, unaware that the ripple Effects from that one game would follow him around for probably the rest of his life. There’s actually a video from around this time, back before Minecraft was even called Minecraft. It was just cave game back then and the video description read as follows: “This is a very early test of an Infiniminer clone I’m working on. It will have more resource management and materials, if I ever get around to finishing it.” Less than two years later, Zach is volunteering at the awards ceremony where Notch wins the Grand Prize. And it’s gotta be in moments like that, that the horrible voice at the back of your head, starts whispering things like: this doesn’t feel right. Something unfair has happened here. You shouldn’t be okay with this. “For a long time, that was sort of the mood surrounding this. And so, if that’s the mood, when you’re in Target and you see a rack of Minecraft t-shirts for the first time, you’re just like: oh for fuck’s sake, you know?” It gets worse too. While Zach was working at Microsoft, they actually brought him into the meeting in which the company decided it wanted Minecraft on the Xbox 360. “So I’m just sitting there in the meeting, I don’t say a word the whole time, and they’re Just talking about Minecraft and bringing Minecraft to the platform, and how many gajillion dollars it’s going to do. I’m just like: I don’t know why I’m here, but this is pretty humiliating.” It’s important to point out here that Minecraft’s success did not crush Zach, it very much didn’t. The next game he’d make after Infiniminer was called Spacechem and would go onto launch his game dev career, leading onto Zach creating his own studio, Zachtronics, and releasing a bunch of extremely well-loved puzzles games about making stuff over the years. And so my question for Zach was: How do you stop yourself from putting your creative ambitions to one side, going back to that Target and getting arrested for stealing loads and loads of Minecraft t-shirts instead? “You can feel bad and still be productive.” Like, the two aren’t mutually exclusive. I feel bad all the time about stuff, right? I still manage to get stuff done. But the longer answer, according to Zach, is that things just got easier with time. The more Minecraft grew, the less and less it started to resemble his work with Infiniminer. And at some point Minecraft stopped being just a game and became an entire industry in its own right and strangely enough, that also seemed to help. In fact, Zach does remember the day he got over all this. And it’s probably not the day you might imagine. And that was the day that Microsoft bought Minecraft for two billion dollars. Oh my god, that was the day that everything just got better. Like, for real. I’m not even joking. That was the day that everything got so much better. Because it’s like, okay, so if Microsoft just spent Two billion dollars on this, after it’s already make a f*ck ton of money. That means this is literally the most successful game, like, ever. Yeah, I don’t know, it just seemed like such a farce at that point. Two billion dollars for a game! No game has ever been bought for anything Close to two billion dollars! That’s just like… I guess it’s just that. It was such a crazy, absurd thing that it just defies reason. You can’t even like… It’s just… it’s hilarious. I asked Zach if he’s ever spoken to Notch about any of this and he told me that no, He hasn’t. Although he did get in touch with him once, after years of not being invited to the big Minecraft party at GDC. Zach decided to put on a competing Infiniminer party at exactly the same time, although it was hosted in an Indian restaurant, rather than something Like this, so you know, the vibe was slightly different. But he decided to send Notch an invitation. Notch replied and said he couldn’t make it due to a prior engagement. And so that’s the story behind Infiniminer, the game that inspired Minecraft. Thanks so Much to Zach Barth for sharing it with and if you enjoyed this video, do make sure to subscribe, or like the video or something, before another YouTuber is inspired to tell it themselves in a way that’s frankly, more appealing to a mainstream audience and therefore Achieves the viral success that we never could. Because I don’t have what Zach Barth has… I won’t take something like that well at all. I just won’t. And we’d also like to say thank you to Skillshare for sponsoring this video. Skillshare is a website for getting better at things that you’re not very good at, like for example, in my case: Instagram! I recently watched this class by photographer, Brandon Woelfel, and he has 3.1 million followers on the ‘gram. I have 800. So plenty to learn! One thing I did pick up is that when he’s taking photos at night, he doesn’t like to rely on flash too much, instead preferring to work with props that can act as a light source themselves. Let’s give that a whirl, shall we? Oh, watch out Chris! You know what? Fair play Brandon, that’s come out a treat. Anyway, if you hate photographs, Skillshare also offers a ranges of different classes from video editing, to productivity, to game development, which might be of interest to some of you, with a Premium Membersghip costing less than $10 per month. And hey, if you’d like to have a look free of charge, the first 500 people to use this link right here, will get two months Premium Membership without paying a penny, so give that a go, if you like! Thank you for watching and, as ever, thank you so much to our Patrons for supporting the work that we do. Cheers. Video Information
This video, titled ‘The Game That Inspired Minecraft, But Never Made a Penny’, was uploaded by People Make Games on 2020-02-27 14:00:04. It has garnered 416621 views and 24727 likes. The duration of the video is 00:13:01 or 781 seconds.
Before Minecraft, there was another game: Infiniminer.
The first 500 people to use this link will get a 2 month free trial of Skillshare Premium Membership: https://skl.sh/peoplemakegames9
Support us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/PeopleMakeGames
Check out our t-shirts: https://store.dftba.com/collections/people-make-games
Written and presented by Chris Bratt: https://twitter.com/bratterz
Design and art direction by Anni Sayers: https://twitter.com/anni_sayers
#Minecraft #Infiniminer