I've been playing Minecraft with some regularity since...
gulp... 2010, I guess? I actually started on a "Classic" server, which they haven't supported for well over a decade, now – it was only building stuff with no monsters or gameplay mechanics or anything, but I still had a ton of fun meeting people. (Oh my god, if anyone out there is from xCraft, please, drop me a line – I loved you guys!) I got the full game in late 2011, right before the 1.8 Adventure Update came out, and I've been adoring it ever since. I genuinely think that, if I had to pick one video game to represent the entire medium, it would be Minecraft.
Me and my friends (both IRL and online) and my siblings had a ton of fun playing together, of course – we'd build castles and mansions and massive underground networks connected by redstone-powered minecart stations – and a fantastic time was had by all. But where the game
really shone for me was in its challenge maps, and specifically a little one called
Skyblock, which has eaten up more hours than I care to admit over the past decade of my life
.
If you've never played it, Skyblock is a challenge map where the entire game world is limited to what you see above. (Well, sort of, the map has a few little secrets for you to discover in that blue void, but that's pretty much it.) Inside that chest is a single ice block, a single bucket containing a single lava block, and a single items' worth of watermelon seeds. Your goal is to create
your own world by exploiting the game's systems – you have to learn to survive purely by manipulating the blocks and items in such a way that you can reliably feed yourself, create additional blocks, and build your own living quarters. If you fall off that island carrying a key item, you're fucked, Chuck. I
live for challenges like this.
The amount of creativity, experimentation, improvisation, and fun this one map consisting of around 27 blocks has given me and my friends cannot be overstated. In multiplayer, we'd lose our minds at some of the things we'd manage to achieve, and laugh our heads off yelling over every mistake. ("YOU
DROPPED THE BUCKET!? HOW DID YOU MANAGE TO DROP THE BUCKET? NOW HOW ARE WE GOING TO BUILD AN INFINITE WATER GENERATOR!?!?!?!") Even in single-player, I'd while hours and hours away at my own private maps – this was my go-to "listening to a podcast" game for many years – and marvel at just how much I could achieve with such limited resources. Skyblock on its own makes Minecraft a top 10 – maybe even top 5 – video game for me.
These days, I play the PS4 version of Minecraft very often, usually in hardcore mode – I really like how "roguelike" it makes the gameplay, and I have a ton accomplishing what I can before a fucking skeleton shoots my head off from a million miles away. They've added so, so much to the game over the years, and I'm always discovering something new and getting obsessed over some crazy mechanic. (Most recently, breeding frogs.) I fully understand people who say the game has gotten way too complicated and bloated, and a lot of mechanics and items are completely dead-end, but I still love Minecraft just as much as I did in my teenhood, and I probably always will.
Notch, you're a fat fedora-wearing Twitter-addicted psycho who built your empire off a stolen game concept, but you're also the greatest indie developer ever, so I guess it balances out.
One last thing: my first time playing the "full" version of Minecraft was on the PC Gamer demo, which I got off a cover disk from the June 2011 issue, which also had a very detailed piece on Minecraft's development. I really loved that demo – it was timed, but the map had loads of neat secrets and little nooks and crannies to explore. I got a ton out of it, and so did my friends and cousins who I shared the disk with. That article was really good, too... man, PC Gamer was a great mag back in the day, and now it's a load of slop like they all are. Great memories, though!
