Minecraft

Minecraft is a game about exploring, mining, and crafting! Fun fact: This game is currently the top seller of all time on PC!

☀Minecraft is a sandbox video game originally created by Swedish programmer Markus "Notch" Persson and later developed and published by Mojang. Wikipedia

Initial release date: October 7, 2011

Series: Minecraft

Developers: Mojang, Microsoft Studios, 4J Studios

Designers: Markus Persson, Jens Bergensten

Awards: Kids’ Choice Award for Favorite Videogame, and more

Platforms: Android, PlayStation 4, iOS, PlayStation 3, and more

Minecraft is a sandbox video game originally created by Swedish programmer Markus "Notch" Persson and later developed and published by Mojang. The creative and building aspects of Minecraft enable players to build constructions out of textured cubes in a3D procedurally generated world. Other activities in the game include exploration, resource gathering, crafting, and combat. Multiple gameplay modes are available, including survival mode where the player must acquire resources to build the world and maintain health, a creative mode where players have unlimited resources to build with and the ability to fly, an adventure mode where players can play custom maps created by other players, and a spectator mode where players can fly around and clip through blocks, but cannot place or destroy any. The PC version of the game is renowned for its third-party mods, which add various new items, characters, worlds, and quests to the game.

Minecraft received five awards during the 2011 Game Developers Conference. Of the Game Developers Choice Awards, it won the Innovation Award, Best Downloadable Game Award, and Best Debut Game Award; from the Independent Games Festival, it won the Audience Award and the Seumas McNally Grand Prize. In 2012, Minecraft was awarded a Golden Joystick Award in the category Best Downloadable Game. As of June 2016, over 106 million copies had been sold, with more than 40 million unique Minecraft players each month across all the various platforms the game is available on] making it the best-selling PC game to date and the second best-selling video game of all time behind Tetris.

The game world is procedurally generated as players explore it, using a map seed which is obtained from the system clock at the time of world creation unless manually specified by the player. Although there are limits on movement up and down, Minecraft allows for an infinitely large game world to be generated on the horizontal plane, only running into technical problems when extremely distant locations are reached. The game achieves this by splitting the game world data into smaller sections called "chunks", which are only created or loaded into memory when players are nearby.

Minecraft is an three-dimensional sandbox game that has no specific goals for the player to accomplish, allowing players a large amount of freedom in choosing how to play the game. However, there is an achievement system. Gameplay by default is first person, but players have the option to play in third person mode. The core gameplay revolves around breaking and placing blocks. The game world is composed of rough 3D objects—mainly cubes—arranged in a fixed grid pattern and representing different materials, such as dirt, stone, various ores, water, lava, tree trunks, etc. While players can move freely across the world, objects can only be placed at fixed locations on the grid. Players can gather these material blocks and place them elsewhere, thus allowing for various constructions.

At the start of the game, the player is placed on the surface of a procedurally generated and virtually infinite game world. The world is divided into biomes ranging from deserts to jungles to snowfields. Players can walk across the terrain consisting of plains, mountains, forests, caves, and various water bodies. The in-game time system follows a day and night cycle, with one full cycle lasting 20 real-time minutes. Throughout the course of the game, players encounter various non-player characters known as mobs, including animals, villagers and hostile creatures. Non-hostile animals—such as cows, pigs, and chickens—can be hunted for food and crafting materials, and spawn in the daytime. By contrast, hostile mobs—such as large spiders, skeletons, and zombies—spawn during nighttime or in dark places, such as caves. Some Minecraft-unique creatures have been noted by reviewers, such as the Creeper, an exploding creature that sneaks up on the player; and the Enderman, a creature with the ability to teleport and pick up blocks.