Minecraft (2009)

I grew up on this game. This game basically shaped my childhood and I started playing around 10 years ago when I was 8 or 9.

Even if I play it with friends every now and then, remembering about it back in the childhood brings back soo many emotions. I don't need to explain about this game to anyone, everyone knows already. This was the first game I ever payed for. I have spent soo many hours in this directly and indirectly. I have got soo many incredible memories by this.

I bought the alpha version of Minecraft when it was first released. It went the old school way: A badly designed HTML 5 page from Mojang on which you could buy a game called Minecraft for seven euros. After that, you could download the game in a zipped .jar format and extract it to your pc. Start the Minecraft launcher and you are good to go.

When I first played Minecraft, I did not know what to expect but the whole survival and free build concept immediately intrigued me. It felt so new and fresh but the ancient graphics (who were much, much worse back then) took some time to get used to. I started building a nice, safe home right away and looked for coal to make some lights.

Minecraft has laid the foundation for all the crafting survival games out there and, in a way, I am proud that I played “the original” one first.

The whole concept of the game has not changed much over the years. Just build stuff and, in the present times, defeat a dragon and conquer a fortress, located in the seventh layer of hell.

The game has been updated over the years and it remains fascinating to see how such a simple, small game, became one of the biggest open world games of all time. Every update included a ton of added resources, items, mechanics and mobs and still does these days. You now can make potions, grow any crop you can think of, enchant stuff, make magic books, the list goes on.

Today, whole servers with custom build playrooms, mighty castles, incredible build projects and unimaginable feats have been accomplished and it is just great to see how creative people can be with this game.

I spent hours surviving, building nice castles and exploring the caves and the nether. It was all good fun. With mods you can make the game into everything you could ever imagen, my personal favourite being Pixelmonn.

The only problem I have nowadays with Mincecraft is that it has no purpose anymore for me. Back then it was new, the exploring and surviving was a goal on its own. Today, I am sometimes motivated to build a huge castle or project, spent hours and hours of my free time on it and then, when it is finished, I take a death stare into limbo and ask myself: “What was the purpose of this”? Technically you can beat the game nowadays by slaying the Ender Dragon, something I already did. The credits roll and you have beaten Minecraft, but still, the game goes on after that and there is no ultimate end goal. I experience this issue with other sandbox survival build games too, but with Minecraft, it is the worst.

It could be my age (30 next month), after all, Minecraft is now considered a kid’s game, fun for the whole family. Whatever the case, these days I can only respect it like I did back then and pas the torch (stick + coal) over to the next generation.

Use to personally love this game and play it to death, but I just don't play it anymore. I don't care for any of the new updates and it just complicates things (probably a mix of nostalgia and personal preference).

Not to mention the poor optimization for the Mac that I've been using. Nothing fixes it. Probably a hardware issue but I have heard the same for any port besides the normal windows one.

Might play this in the future, but probably not. Was good for what it was, not what it is now IMO.

I absolutely LOVE Minecraft!! It's a timeless classic.