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I've never played Minecraft, is this more of a late-millennial thing? (I was born in 1984.)
I'm a little older than you. I discovered Minecraft during it's Alpha from reddit, and binged hard along with my at the time girlfriend. We got seriously lost in Minecraft, and just ordered takeout for a week while we indulged our mutual addiction to exploration and crafting. I lost interest at some point after biomes came out I think? That's all so long ago, sometimes I watch videos about Minecraft and outside of the blocky world, I don't recognize anything that is happening anymore.
I first played it in late 2009 when it was still super primitive, even before alpha, and I was basically instantly blown away by it even in its simplest form. I’m an elder millennial and I was in my 20s at the time, having just started my career.
I might have legitimately been one of the first 100,000 people to play Minecraft in the world.
It’s incredibly funny when I tell kids this, they look at me like I’m a wizened old sorcerer when I spin tales of the old country. My own kids aren’t old enough to understand but where I tell a kid who’s 9-12 about old Minecraft it blows their little minds.
If you want a crazy blast down memory lane, there is still the original forum post up (albeit with some broken image links, but not all) when Notch posted one of the very earliest versions, and it's still hilarious to me how instantly people got addicted, started building castles with moats, pixel art, and suggested multiplayer and survival modes. You can page through some of the 90+ pages of responses, it's nuts to see how instant the positive response was.
I started playing when it was in alpha, survival was still a "new" thing, and the "demo" was a web-browser playable limited-size world with the basic blocks and water flooding instantly to the water level, without a save feature. I was entranced even with that basic setup.
A little hidden gem in that forum thread is the mention of spelunky;
While not as famous as Minecraft, I think it was actually more influential on the history of gaming writ large.
I also played the original freeware version of it and was blown away by it, it came out only a bit before early Minecraft. It totally blew me away and was also an early trendsetter for procedural generation, and basically spawned an entire genre of games and various subgenres.
Legitimately one of the greatest games ever made.
But in retrospect
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You know, this got me thinking about how long the tails of games are now. Like, I adored my father, and when I started playing Nintendo games, he would show off how good he was as Donkey Kong, which was apparently his goto arcade game once upon a time. Blew me away that he could "beat" it on the Nintendo, which if memory serves, and it may not, was completing all 4 screens at least once? I donno. But I had little incentive to play Donkey Kong myself, nor was I amazed at his Donkey Kong "lore", I was just impressed my dad could play an old game, but I preferred the newer ones like Super Mario Brothers 3.
Compared with the 15(?) year legacy of Minecraft, yeah, kids are still going fucknuts over the same game it's feasible that their parents went fucknuts over a decade prior. There are titles so evergreen, they've become a multi-generational institution not unlike reading the same books to your kid that were read to you. The only thing slowing it down is parents' awareness of the dangers of screen time for young children.
Yeah, that era changed gaming in a big way. Modding, free content updates, games so dominant in their space that multiplayer was permanent, all happened in just a few short years. League came out in 2009, Minecraft in 2010, Skyrim in 2011. Okay, fine, CS is older, and so is WoW, but both of those released paid expansions or new games periodically, so they don't quite fit the same. But the iPhone came out in 2007, so right in that same period when smartphones hit critical mass was when the first microtransaction-based games came out. FarmVille in 2009, Clash of Clans in 2012, Candy Crush Saga in 2012. So that 2009-2012ish period had an unusually massive impact.
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Minecraft alpha first got mainstream attention in September 2010, so it'd more of a formative teenager experience for people born in the mid-to-late 1990s at earliest. There's older folk who got into it early, myself included, but in your age it'd be either competing with late college or early career stuff. And there's been regular resurgences -- 2013-2016 with real mainstreaming of both modded and multiplayer streamers for example -- so it's not really a single generational thing.
Yes, I was not much older than a child when Minecraft burst onto the scene, and despite that, it still was astonishing to me when Minecraft started to be treated as “kids stuff.” When I got into it it had an all-ages appeal and the YouTube Minecraft community was full of adults who played it because they enjoyed it, not because they wanted ad dollars from companies wanting to advertise to children. I remember when the focal point of Minecraft content switched from normal gaming YouTubers to people like StampyLongHead, who always came across to me as kinda creepy in his obvious attempt to appeal directly to children over the internet.
Real OPs remember when paulsoaresjr tutorials were the premier way to learn about Minecraft. Even realer OP’s remember X’s adventures in Minecraft.
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Ah, well yes I'd say so, so that's a good point. Anyone college age or younger when it started getting big 2010-2011, so I'll admit that only captures... maybe half? Dunno if it really "counts" the older half Millennial parents playing it with their kids. I'll admit I'm '93, on the tail end, so that might skew my perspective slightly. Considering also the male-coded aspect, maybe it's only about a quarter of Millennials? Still, curious if any broader theme resonates, or if the whole thing is making a mountain out of a molehill.
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...
Vanilla survival. You're placed into a random location, under serious and often annoying constraints, such that Things Will Suck if you don't change them. That's not just the normal combat-progression stuff, although the difference between stone tools and enchanted diamond ones are pretty vast too. Traveling too far taking too long? Build a highway through hell or tame a horse or breed a mule, or get a hangglider ('elytra') and be able to cover in seconds what could previously take ten minutes. Creepers blow up your front door (again)? Build a guard post, or tame an ocelot to scare them off. Sick of running out of food? Build a scenic farm and start raising animals.
Creatives. Yes, the graphics are dated and it's nothing like equivalent to a true modeling software, but you can build a lot with it. More importantly, if you're struggling to make something in Creative Mode, it's not likely to be because the controls are fighting you, unlike something like Blender.
Completionism. Collect some amount of every block, get to every dimension and beat the Ender Dragon, have a fully functional (and safe) village, get all the achievements, yada yada.
'Technical' minecraft play. You know those stories where someone get sucked into a world with bizarre rules and has to find ways to exploit them? Minecraft is one of those things, and even in the modern day a lot of it's still something to be discovered or shared for most kids, rather than Just Look At GameFAQs. In vanilla, this can range from iron or cactus farming to breaking bedrock to RS-latchs and sorting systems to self-driving mining machines. (I haven't seen the movie, but this is one of the reasons I don't think the thread-writer is really engaged with the game: the bucket nun-chunks thing from the trailers is absolutely the sort of things that minecraft players mentor each other with.)
In modded minecraft, the above, but more so. Mods like Create or Botania have dozens of major puzzles built into their basic play, and hundreds or thousands if you're trying to go after specific uses. Or you can go the full GregTech-focused modpack if you want. Some of these might have only a few hundred active players, or you can make challenges that literally no one has ever tried. (HexCasting with dolphin memory? Using Spectrum and NeepMeat as your sole item transportation mods in a factory-focused pack like MI:Foundation? GFL.)
Survival multiplayer, aka social play. These tend to be some of the most popular and funniest to watch, but a lot of people just enjoy goofing off (or dying horribly) with friends. HyPixel is the degenerate (ie, gotcha game) case, but the ideal case has a variety of people finding different things that they enjoy doing, and then having them work with each other on that.
Guided challenges. Popularized by JadedCats Agrarian Skies in the 1.6 era, modded games can include questbooks or other breadcrumbs with specific challenges to complete, usually starting with basic survival and going onto things like automating production of million meals or building a single piece of the forbidden clay. Blightfall is probably the most whole-heartedly designed approach down to a fully customized world, but Create: Above and Beyond, the Material Energy series, SevTech, Manufactio, Crash Landing, and Cottage Witch are all great options for different types of play. (GregTech:NewHorizons is the magnum opus in a... different sense.)
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There is a world beyond these shores, a new world ready for you to shape, full of ancient wonders, fantastical creatures, mighty foes and riches beyond imagination.
Embark on this journey with nothing but your wits and your friends, and make your mark. You will tame these new shores and uncover the secrets of its ancient inhabitants as you make yourself the rightful shepherd of these lands and beyond.
Or, forego all danger and give yourself the power of a God, and draw from your imagination to shape a whole world into the cathedrals of your mind.
Or, bring yourself into a truly anarchic free for all competition for domination and survival. Many legendary figures have lived here before you and the world bears the marks of their wars. Ancient forteresses blown up, empires defiled, and yet so much that still remains hidden, forgotten and lost. Find help in your fellow man, but remember that alliances are fleeting, and that people can find your exact location through the patterns of the stone in a picture.
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To add to the other comments. It also has a lot of mods. Some that focus on action and adventure, others that focus more on the pure creation lego aspect, and then you also have automation mods. Like Factorio was inspired by a Minecraft mod originally. So an entire genre came out of it.
The lego aspect of it really appealed to me as a kid, but I still love the automation mods. Especially when your base is functional and looks good.
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For my generation, a few aspects, but to me the core appeal was the sort of human (male) survival-adjacent aspect. You are in a world alone, you survive, beat down the wildlife, bend it to your will, build things that leave a permanent mark on the world, etc. Scratches a bit of the human itch that way. There was also originally a bit of the self-taught pride, because you had to go to the wiki to figure out how to actually make stuff (the game literally had no tutorial for over 6 years!) or consult YouTube to set up some limited automation via some jank unintentional mechanics (for example, to originally boost a minecart to crazy speeds, you had to have little smaller minecarts spinning in tiny circle tracks tangential to your main track) so if you did something notable (or creative/effortful, especially in a server with friends), it was impressive! And also, for those of us in school or college, it was a nice side outlet that felt a little more wholesome than the games like counterstrike, Dota2, League, etc. that were just getting going at the time. Plus, updates were frequent, so you could re-discover and build on your knowledge (for free) a few months or years after last playing, or maybe a friend would start up a server, so you'd potentially go in cycles of binging.
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How about the appeal of legos? But there's also a mode where instead of just having all the legos you want, you have to hunt for/create them, following a gameplay loop, with just enough adversarial events (monsters) to keep you from getting complacent too easily.
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