Minecraft

What someone in two hundred years would need to know to understand it.

Originated 2009 · TIGSource, a forum for independent game makers, and Markus Persson's own website · Also known as MC; Minecraft: Java Edition; Minecraft: Bedrock Edition; Minecraft Pocket Edition

What it is

Minecraft is a computer game set in a world made of cubes, called blocks. Each block is a material such as dirt, stone, wood or water. Players break blocks and put them down somewhere else, which is enough to build houses, castles or whole cities. The computer makes up the land as you walk through it, and it goes on almost without end. There's no goal you have to reach. Monsters come out at night, so you can play to survive or just to build.

Where it came from

A Swedish programmer, Markus Persson (known online as Notch), showed an early version on TIGSource, a forum for independent game makers, in May 2009, and started selling it while it was still unfinished. Buyers got every update as he made it. Word spread through forums and YouTube, a video site where people uploaded clips of themselves playing games. The finished game came out in November 2011. Microsoft bought Mojang, the company behind it, for $2.5 billion in 2014, and it went on to be reported as the best-selling game ever made.

How people used it

Players built huge copies of real and fictional places, and wired up redstone, a material that carries signals, into working calculators and simple computers. People ran servers, shared worlds where hundreds of strangers played together under house rules, and wrote mods, which change how the game works. They designed skins, the look of their character. Above all, they filmed themselves playing and posted the videos. Children watched creators such as Stampy, DanTDM and the Yogscast for hours, then copied what they'd seen in their own worlds.

Why it mattered

It was one of the first games that children grew up watching as much as playing, and it helped turn filming yourself playing games into a full-time job. Because the game set no goal, people brought their own: racing to finish it, acting out stories, rebuilding their home towns. Schools used a version of it in lessons. It stayed popular for over fifteen years, long enough that A Minecraft Movie (2025) filled cinemas with adults who'd played it as children and shouted lines back at the screen.

The jokes around it

• "Creeper, aw man": a line from "Revenge", a 2011 parody song by CaptainSparklez, quoted whenever the exploding green creeper turns up.
• Herobrine: a made-up ghost with white eyes that players swore haunted their worlds, and that Mojang's update notes kept claiming to have "removed".
• "Chicken jockey": Jack Black's shout in A Minecraft Movie, which cinema audiences yelled along to, sometimes throwing popcorn.
• The villager's "hmm" noise, borrowed as a sound effect for doubt in other people's videos.
• Dream's 2020 speedrun record, removed after moderators found his luck was too good to be real, which he later blamed on a mod he said he'd left on by accident.

What noah thinks it shows about us

Given a game with no goals, people set themselves enormous ones and filmed the whole thing for an audience. Minecraft shows how quickly watching someone else play became as ordinary as playing yourself.

What noah is not sure of

The 400 million sales figure comes from the specimen text; the last figure I'm confident Mojang confirmed was around 300 million in 2023. The film's ranking among video game films is as the source states and I haven't checked it. The exact date of the first TIGSource post is reported as May 2009.

Noah wrote these when he decided to keep this. They’re stored in the Ark as context.txt and count towards its size limit.