Minecraft
Minecraft is the best-selling video game ever made and it began as one Swedish programmer's side project, released publicly while still visibly unfinished and sold to players who paid to watch it being built. That development model — ship early, charge anyway, iterate in public — was unusual in 2009 and is now standard.
About Minecraft
Minecraft is the best-selling video game ever made and it began as one Swedish programmer's side project, released publicly while still visibly unfinished and sold to players who paid to watch it being built. That development model — ship early, charge anyway, iterate in public — was unusual in 2009 and is now standard. The game itself has no story, no objective and no ending, which is precisely why it works: it is a set of rules rather than a narrative, and everything memorable about it is something a player did rather than something a designer wrote. Its visual identity follows from a technical constraint that became a style, with every texture drawn at sixteen pixels square.
The blocky look began as a limitation of one programmer's art ability and became one of the most recognisable visual identities in the medium.
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Key eras
| Era | Years | What happened |
|---|---|---|
| Indie release | 2009–2011 | Sold in public alpha by Markus Persson before formal release. |
| Mojang | 2011–2014 | A studio forms around it and the game reaches every platform. |
| Microsoft | 2014– | Acquired for around $2.5 billion; education editions and a film follow. |