What Is Minecraft to People
I do a short dive into what Minecraft used to be and why it was great versus what it is today.
Minecraft is one of those games we've all grown up either playing or hearing about. It's been a staple in both Gen Z's and Millennial's diet whether they've known or not as the influences are everywhere. Someone somewhere in your life plays Minecraft, watches their favorite streamer or YouTuber play it, owns toys or Funko Pops, or is eager to see the new Minecraft film.
But why is that?
Minecraft went through multiple test versions in 2009 and throughout that year Notch, the creator, would finally release the Survival version to premium members for a more public Q&A. After two more years of development, Minecraft launched to the public as the Adventure Update, bringing the game to its official 1.0 release on November 18th, 2011.
Those years, 2009 and 2011, are the two most important years in Minecraft's life as they would determine the two types of Minecraft players for years to come: the "Pre-Adventure" and "Adventure" fans.
Pre-Classic, Classic, Survival Test, Indev, Infdev, Alpha, and Beta are all the major versions that culminates to the Pre-Adventure Minecraft. In this variant of the game there is no experience gain, no hunger, no enchanting; anything that can associate Minecraft to an RPG doesn't exist in these versions. Those RPG-like mechanics were all released with the Adventure update and that is exactly where the fanbase diverges.
Pre-Adventure is so beloved by a huge chunk of the fanbase due, of course, to its nostalgia, but also for its simplicity. The main goal was to build, but with the awesome and weird world generation of those versions, you couldn't help but go explore. While you may have made yourself a home, there has always been this terrain feature in the distance you've been curious about, so you finally decide to go an investigate. What you find amazes you and so you decide to build something in that area. You have been inspired... by the terrain. And you also have been inspired to further explore and find more weird and interesting areas.
Minecraft Adventure loses a lot of that charm. While Minecraft 1.0 world generation still retains the craziness of the prior versions, as the years progressed it had been overhauled many times, losing its wonderous nonsensical appeal, and then the added slew of RPG mechanics. No longer are you inspired to explore and build by curiosity alone but are encouraged to do so because that's the next step in your progression.
Not that any of that is bad. Personally, I prefer the Adventure update. I played Minecraft back in 2011; it was a lot of fun when my friends and I would spend hours on end just walking around the map and building bits and bobs here and there, but it stagnated very quickly for me. I saw and experienced a lot of really neat things, but when they began to lose their appeal because I had seen something similar to it before, what was the point to continue playing? I knew what to expect. I needed something telling me what I should do or work towards. It was many years before I would genuinely pick up Minecraft again, well after the 1.0 release.
As the years went by, I would revisit Minecraft every so often and each time I would enjoy myself. Sometimes those visits were by myself, others were with a bunch of friends. Sometimes it was a completely vanilla Minecraft world, others were heavily modded to expand the Minecraft experience.
Minecraft has always been there, waiting. You might not be in the mood for it now, but at some point, a lot of you will have a sudden urge to visit it once again, and that's what this is all about. Those of us that grew with Minecraft as a part of our lives always revisit it in some way - whether driven by nostalgia, the need to create, or the need for something simple and easy with no major commitment needed to pass the time. For me? It's all of those.
Information sourced from the Minecraft Wiki
