Minecraft is a sandbox video game first made by Markus "Notch" Persson. It was sold to Microsoft in 2014 for 2.5 billion American dollars. Over 238 million copies of the game have been sold. This makes it the best-selling video game of all time.
In Minecraft, players explore a free walkable world filled with many 3D items. Many of these items are cubes, called "blocks". These include basic terrain and resources such as dirt, stone, wood, and sand. There are also items the player can use, such as crafting tables, furnaces, blast furnaces, looms, and stonecutters among others. Players can use these to make new items such as tools and armor, as well as different kinds of blocks. Players can then build structures using these blocks, such as buildings, statues, pixel art, and more.
Minecraft has a large community. It has a lot of user-generated content (things made by players) like mods, servers, skins, texture packs, and custom maps, which add new gameplay features and game modes to the base game.
Minecraft has three main versions: Java Edition, Bedrock Edition, and Education. Java Edition is the first version of Minecraft made, but Bedrock Edition is now used more due to it being multi-platform. Bedrock Edition and Education are written in C++, and Java Edition is written in Java. In the past, special versions of Minecraft were made just for video game consoles.
History
Minecraft was originally created as an experiment to test random generation for caves. Minecraft was inspired by Infiniminer, a game created by Zachary Barth. The first version of Minecraft was released for PC players on May 17, 2009 and it was called Cave Game. After going through alpha and beta versions, the full version was released on November 18, 2011. A version for Android was released on October 7, 2011, and an iOS version was released on November 17, 2011.
At first, Minecraft was created only by Markus Persson. Other people started to work on it when Persson started an independent video game company called Mojang Specifications. The company was later renamed simply to Mojang. Later in 2011, a version named Minecraft: Pocket Edition was released for iOS and Android devices. This version was later renamed "Bedrock Edition". In 2012, Persson gave Jens "Jeb" Bergensten the job of being the main developer of Minecraft.
Minecraft has also released on many video game consoles. On May 9, 2012, Minecraft came out on the Xbox 360 as a download through the Xbox Live Arcade. It was available for 1600 Microsoft Points ($19.99). In 2013, Minecraft came out as a disc for the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. On December 10, 2013, a Windows Phone version was released. Versions for the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 were released in September 2014. A version for the PlayStation Vita was released on October 14, 2014. The Wii U edition was released on December 17, 2015. In 2017, versions for the Nintendo Switch and the New Nintendo 3DS were released. The Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and Nintendo Switch were later given the Bedrock Edition, which allowed players of these systems to play together.
Gameplay
At the start of the game, players are put in a random location in the game world. They can begin breaking blocks to collect resources, such as wood and dirt, which can be used later in the game. Players can use resources to make new tools, such as pickaxes, which let the player gather stone in the caves that they find. Different resources require different tools to collect them. For example, diamonds can only be collected with an iron pickaxe, or one of a better quality.
The game world is mostly infinite. As players explore it, the game makes new sections of the world using procedural generation. The game generates different kinds of terrain in biomes. Different biomes have different blocks in them. For example, a taiga biome will have lots of spruce trees and snow, whereas a plains biome will have lots of grass. The player can also find different structures in the world, like mountains and villages.