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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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