Game Review – Minecraft

Patrick Sullivan
A little over a month after its beta release, the initial Minecraft craze has continued to build steam; a perfect time for your intrepid gaming reporter to sit back and analyze the game for its merits. With purposefully low-quality visuals, sound, no endgame, and above all the fact that the game is still in active development, something about Minecraft’s gameplay makes it addicting enough to draw over one million sales without a retail store release or advertising – but what?
Minecraft began as the pet project of Swedish game developer Markus Persson of Mojang Specifications, Inc, more commonly known by his Internet alias Notch. Persson began development of Minecraft after leaving online game company King.com with a simple concept: simulate a world that players could harvest resources from and build with. “I'm much more interested in making working interactive worlds than just pretty sets you walk around in,” says Persson. “I will work on other games on the side, to preserve my creative sanity, but it will be my primary focus for probably quite some time to come. Hopefully.”
The primary draw of Minecraft is its creative aspect – the ability of the player to build complex structures or furnish existing caves. Building materials take several forms: dirt, sand, stone, water, wood, various metal ores, and so on. While the player focuses on expanding their creations on the surface, they venture into procedurally generated caves to harvest these resources (“mining”), utilizing already-gathered materials to make the caves traversable and well-lit. It is quite literally possible to build everything conceivable; players have constructed simple houses, replicas of the starship Enterprise, and fully functional 16-bit computers (see picture)!
And what has Persson spent his sudden millions on? “A new hat,” he says with a smile. The feeling of instant wealth is “surreal,” he states in another interview. “You just walk around and all of a sudden you come to think of that – oh. I’m… rich.”
Minecraft is currently available for purchase online for €14.95 (about $20.00 USD). I urge anyone looking for a creative, outside-the-box game experience to pay a visit to minecraft.net and support Persson as he continues to develop the project.
Game Review – Minecraft