Happy 15th Birthday, Minecraft!

 

Image source: insider-gaming.com

Today (May 10, 2024) is a very special day for many Minecraft players. It is the fifteenth anniversary of the game! So, to celebrate, I thought I would write a blog post about it.

Minecraft's development began on May 10, 2009 by a Swedish game developer named Markus Persson, better known as Notch. The game was released for the first time a week later on May 17. Because of this, consider the occasion to be a week-long celebration. Notch was the founder of Mojang Studios.

Unfortunately, in 2014, Minecraft and Mojang Studios were acquired by Microsoft, and now we no longer receive very good feature additions. The reason why we no longer get very good features is because Minecraft used to be much more of an indie game (Notch could wake up one day and decide to add a person in a frog suit), but now it is owned by a much larger company. Essentially, there are more people now who must all agree on adding a particular feature, rather than a small group. And Notch is no longer a part of Minecraft's development either.

But that issue is one for another post. Let's talk about some of my experiences in Minecraft throughout the years.

I first found out about Minecraft when I was four years old (I think?). I used to watch my older sister play Pocket Edition on her tablet. A bit later on, she set up some parental controls on the tablet and gave it to me to play games (including Minecraft) on. I was quite naive and ignorant at the time.

When my sister played Minecraft, she would always find villages in deserts. That caused me to conclude that deserts were the only biomes that villages could generate in! When I found a plains village for the first time, I thought it was a rare sighting. And I used to call plains villages "stronghold villages" because of that one seed template in the Seed Picker. That was back before I knew what a stronghold was, or even before I knew about the dragon.

It also took me awhile to figure out that to trade with a villager, you do not punch it while holding a random item.

I remember the first time I played survival mode too. For some reason the only thing I wanted to do in that survival world was get killed by monsters. I wanted to see what would happen. That was back when the only monsters were zombies, creepers, spiders, endermen, and skeletons.

Either one, two, or three years later, my sister showed me a picture of an enderdragon flying through the sky. That picture sparked my curiosity, so I began trying to figure out a way to find one. In 2016 or 2017, I started reading the in-game encyclopedia, but its section about the End Dimension was quite mysterious and confusing. It mentioned end portals, which was the main thing that caught my eye (no pun intended). You know those holes that end portal frames have, where the eye of ender would go? I used to think that somehow if you place one down and wait long enough, a dragon would pop out of the hole. Obviously, it didn't work.

It was around this time that I started seeking Minecraft tutorials on the Internet, the first one being DigMinecraft's tutorial on how to build a nether portal. Before I had seen a picture of the nether I thought it was some kind of taiga biome variant. And I called taiga biomes (and swamps) "militaries" back then for some reason.

Anyways, I checked and noticed that DigMinecraft had a tutorial on how to build an end portal, so I followed the steps and before I knew it I was in the End Dimension for the very first time. I was in creative mode of course.

The only issue was that no matter what I tried, I couldn't defeat the dragon. I had no idea that the end crystals on top of the obsidian pillars were healing it. I tried for weeks to no avail.

One day I just decided to experiment with various things, until finally I figured out that it was the end crystals keeping the dragon alive. After breaking them, defeating it was easy.

After that, I read about end cities and the outer islands. I thought that the bedrock portal that opens up after defeating the dragon would lead to the outer islands, but of course it lead me back to my respawn point in the overworld. However, later on, in another DigMinecraft tutorial, I read that throwing an ender pearl into the end gateway portal would teleport me to the outer islands. After that I was able to find an end city for the first time in my life. It took me long enough, over three years of playing the game before I looted my first end city!

And that's about it. It's kind of sad to think about how I used to be such a noob and had no idea about most of the features in Minecraft, but now I know almost everything there is to know about it. It's also sad to think about how much the game has changed since then. And how now almost every Minecraft player seems to think their builds have to be "realistic". But their idea of realistic is quite different from mine. Using spruce wood and mixing random blocks in your house's wall is not realistic!

But anyways, that would conclude this post. Props to Notch for creating the most popular game in the universe, which has sold over 300 million copies within 15 years! I wonder what Minecraft will look like in another 15 years...

--ILikeSlugs