Unbelievable Pre-Minecraft Games

Good Good not good yet hey R yeah well this time of years you know it’s Eerie it can it can be Eerie how can you tell oh good I’ll add paracity to my list of criteria to measure no no nothing nothing real at least just lifting old dreams wait was

Yeah I do yeah I suppose I do is that what you’re here to talk About okay well um I always loved Minecraft it’s a Sandbox for players modders YouTube personalities and the like kind of goes beyond being a game it’s like a a digital home or something you know even when I don’t actually want to be there it’s it’s nice to know that

It’s waiting for me you know we built that home I don’t know what you mean oh Notch yeah he made Minecraft he became a billionaire and now I’m pretty sure he tweets like a wealthy person I don’t know look I mean don’t get me wrong it’s great that he made Minecraft most

Billionaires do something terrible to get that kind of money and I truly believe that Minecraft is a good thing for the world but now at best Notch is just a guy and he’s a character that I’m not particularly interested in placing in the conversational Limelight something to learn from his work like

What huh what are these R some of Notch’s earliest games he hosted a website called the intra Clinic before founding moang he abandoned The Domain in 2006 and since then it’s been snatched up by a group of game archivists who are trying to preserve his former work that one what’s what’s that one

3d1 an engine test from his early days as an indie developer in the 1990s a lot of what survived from this decade are just scraps of ideas learning exercise es what we’re looking at now is an engine for a basic 3D environment there are other experiments Platformers

Render tests Sid scrollers and even a few RPGs the role playing games all share the same in progress title Ruby Ruby Ruby Ruby land Ruby lands Ruby lands X Ruby dung there there was a clear interest in medieval fantasy as a setting in these titles but I don’t know

Where the Ruby prefix comes from weird you know Minecraft almost had rubies in it instead of emeralds but dinnerbone one of the game’s programmers at moang he was colorblind and he couldn’t easily distinguish The Ore from Redstone so they changed it huh it’s weird those Ruby games didn’t

Pan out and then it was almost an item in Minecraft but even that it didn’t it didn’t work and it literally took a different kind of eye to see that yeah maybe but I think even if embellished the observation could be profound take a look at the Cobblestone walls in

3d1 the grass to dirt transition in heii the inventory tiles in Ruby lands X and even the terrain generation in this isometric renderer test yeah yeah wa this was this was all in the ’90s the idea of Minecraft was over a decade off but between the colors

Textures shapes and even the UI it some of these games really have the vibe it’s like the spirit of Minecraft was already there somehow depends on how you look at it everyone has fundamental creative sensibilities that are hard to shake Notch’s interests naturally faded into Minecraft wherever possible it’s

Logical creativity isn’t always logical R in fact it’s it’s kind of best when it isn’t I’m sorry you were saying into the 2000s Notch did some work on an MMO called worm which is still running to this day in between he continued tinkering whenever he could experimenting with different types of

Gameplay a lot of his focus in the early 2000s went into the Java 4K competition the contest called for developers to write a game in JavaScript that had a total size of 4 kilobytes or less 4 kilobytes that’s that’s nothing even the earliest floppy discs could hold like what 80 kilobytes ooh what’s

That miners 4K you’re kidding it’s not what it sounds like miners 4K is more like an ant farm simulator than anything else the player carves caves for a group of tiny miners to explore in search of gold the miners have an extremely simple Ai and the goal

Is to create paths that result in the most efficient Gold collection possible I’m surprised you didn’t scoff at the Sonic game there was a Sonic game What Notch made a 4K version of Sonic left for dead Mega Man as well as an endless Mario game the rest of the games he made at this time were Standalone experiments across different genres Dungeon Crawlers Shooters even a game about logic gates Legend of the chambered was a

Small Dungeon Crawler that used a few textures that were later repurposed for Minecraft Zombie Town was another small exercise but it was also the origin of the Steve model it’s weird they’re all so quaint they’re small no no look I I definitely can’t and even though these are small by you

Know video game standards they’re well beyond beond my ability to make or even approach making but it’s just yeah I mean in light of all this what was Minecraft another experiment an imitation or something meant to be all of the above Minecraft’s terrain generation was based on an unfinished

Level generator that Notch called Ruby dong its basic gameplay premises were copy from a game called infin Miner developed by Zachary bar Minecraft’s tone color palette and general Aesthetics came from Notch’s previous experiments and his own creative preferences remove any one of those ingredients and Minecraft doesn’t

Properly exist I guess you’re right and you know when he first showcased it it was cave game the community gathered around it they made suggestions and cheered on its development they even gave it its title it is the taking of note that makes something noteworthy Minecraft was

Cultivated by a hungry world full of creative people Minecraft feels like a home Riv because when you were 12 you needed that home lots of people did then what is notch in all of this talented game developer to be sure the right person in the right place at the

Right time someone creative who could ultimately see the project through in its earliest days he went on to make 4 kilobyte versions of Minecraft along with various other small games for Game jams and then there was uh oh what was it called 0x10c right that was going to be most Yang’s next big

Game indeed it would have been a Sci-Fi survival title with an even broader scope than Minecraft a space exploration game where players could fly around and customize their own spaceship eventually exploring planets and interacting with other players and creatures ZX10 C even used A Primitive computer as the ship’s interface players

Would have been able to program all kinds of functionality into the ship even make simple games within the game that’s a cool idea adding coding to a Sandbox game might have taught a lot of new people how to program but that one was never finished right indeed Notch kept hitting walls

Creatively he was trying to escape the shadow of Minecraft and the immense pressure it created but the new game was being touted by the community as some kind of sequel the expectations were just too high you know ultimately that game didn’t need to exist Minecraft is almost

A a force of nature at this point no game has ever really done that in the same way I mean when you do that you don’t really need to take a second crack at it sure yeah you know I I think Minecraft is lightning in a bottle the

Thing about that phrase is it implies someone standing out in a downpour with an open bottle you don’t go out trying to capture lightning it’s a silly thing to attempt and even if you do try you’ll fail and eventually you’ll stop trying because it’s one in a

Billion the only people who ever manage to catch lightning in a bottle are the people who go outside during every single storm to Simply gather the rain huh Notch was just doing something mundane he was just doing the thing that he did for 20 years up until Minecraft was created and then

Suddenly his hobby gave birth to one of the most important games of the 20th Century yeah me too R me too