Minecraft was huge for me as a tween. I started playing in Christmas 2011, and even a year or so after what most of the hardcore gaming crowd consider the best release of Minecraft shipped, it was amazing. Most people who played Minecraft back when there was a genuine sense of mystique, fear and discovery of the unknown to it know that there was an unparalleled feeling you'd get finding and learning about new stuff in the world and game systems; I vividly remember the first time I found out about the Stronghold on the Minecraft Wiki and saw a top-down view of it and some of the blocks around one of its doorways lit by something within, and that screencap alone produced a feeling so intoxicating that it stuck with me for years. I couldn't articulate those feelings back then and obviously most of my fanboyism for the game manifested as bad early 2010s YouTube references and my art at the time filtered through the lens of expressing your internet user eccentricity via lol epic humor, but still.
One of the most compelling things about early Minecraft in comparison to its contemporaries that very few people talk about was the gritty, snarky, "I'm-from-the-deepest-parts-of-the-indie-gaming-net" attitude it had. Coming from Flash games and console/handheld stuff where the most creative thing I'd experienced was Flipnote Hatena or Rhythm Tengoku or screenshots of Noby Noby Boy in my Jump magazines, having a game that unapologetically bared its guts at you, letting you access graphics and coordinate data and tons of actively updating information that would customarily be left to the developer, the fact that it gave you a cursory rundown of what it was doing to create your new world every time you made one, the shameless references and in-jokes aimed at its supporter sites like Facepunch and 4chan and whatever else (I think SomethingAwful too?) was absolutely off the chain. I wasn't familiar with the 80s-computing-inspired indies it was based on and I still can't play Dwarf Fortress very well, but I did kinda get it even back then.
Of course, there's also the fact that the online scene for Minecraft played out like a giant segmented MMO where you could make friends with an actual physical community and township/city that built their own houses, pushed the game systems to develop trade and social stuff, and interfaced with the game at the very thin vertex between self-awareness, sincere want for adventure and full-on LARP. It was a more accessible take on MMO sensibilities, sure, but still special, especially for someone my age. Then there's the amazing soundtrack that's carefully designed to play like an abstract musical movie with a full plot, clear scenes and an end credits theme, the amazing atmosphere, I just...augh! I feel like I'm starting to sound like an old Caddicarus video from back when he didn't know how to make his scripts sound natural, but this game genuinely was a huge positive presence in my life and the only reason I really lost interest in it is because I burnt out having an entire realm to myself when I was dealing with extreme mental health issues in 2018 and I became kind of disillusioned with it between the decaying creative management and feeling like I'd seen all there was to see of it.
I've never played modded, but I'd definitely like to if there are still some good/consistent communities out there for it. The closest I got was plugin-heavy servers with MCMMO and all that junk and Nexus and whatever the other big servers were that I spent a little time on back before I got bored. Anyone else here remember the greatest vanilla Minecraft server of all time, Legacy mob arena?
