43 Facts About Minecraft

Minecraft is a sandbox video game developed by Mojang Studios.

Minecraft has since been ported to several other platforms and is the best-selling video game of all time, with over 238 million copies sold and nearly 140 million monthly active players as of 2021.

Minecraft received critical acclaim, winning several awards and later being cited as one of the greatest video games of all time.

Minecraft is a 3D sandbox game that has no required goals to accomplish, allowing players a large amount of freedom in choosing how to play the game.

Minecraft has two alternative dimensions besides the overworld : the Nether and the End.

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Multiplayer in Minecraft enables multiple players to interact and communicate with each other on a single world.

Modifications of the Minecraft code, called mods, add a variety of gameplay changes, ranging from new blocks, items, and mobs to entire arrays of mechanisms.

Minecraft had already made a 3D texture mapper for another zombie game prototype he had started to try to emulate the style of Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars.

Original edition of Minecraft, now known as the Java Edition, was first developed in May 2009.

The base program of Minecraft was completed by Persson over a weekend in that month and a private testing was released on TigIRC on 16 May 2009.

On 11 December 2010, Persson announced that Minecraft was entering its beta testing phase on 20 December 2010.

Minecraft further stated that bug fixes and all updates leading up to and including the release would still be free.

Since the first full release of Minecraft, dubbed the "Adventure Update", the game has been continuously updated with many major updates, available for free to users who have already purchased the game.

On 16 April 2020, a beta version of Minecraft implementing physically based rendering, ray tracing and DLSS was released by Nvidia on RTX-enabled GPUs.

On 22 March 2012, it was announced that Minecraft would be the flagship game in a new Xbox Live promotion called Arcade NEXT.

On 18 December 2018, the PlayStation 3, PlayStation Vita, Xbox 360, and Wii U versions of Minecraft received their final update and would later become known as Legacy Console Editions.

PlayStation 4 version of Minecraft was updated in December 2019 and became part of the Bedrock Edition, which enabled cross-platform play for users with a free Xbox Live account.

Minecraft: Education Edition is an educational version of the base game, designed specifically for use in educational establishments such as schools, and built off of the Bedrock Edition codebase.

On 20 May 2016, Minecraft China was announced as a localized edition for China, where it was released under a licensing agreement between NetEase and Mojang.

Minecraft 4K is a simplified version of Minecraft similar to the Classic version that was developed for the Java 4K game programming contest "in way less than 4 kilobytes".

Early versions of Minecraft received critical acclaim, praising the creative freedom it grants players in-game, as well as the ease of enabling emergent gameplay.

Critics have praised Minecraft complex crafting system, commenting that it is an important aspect of the game's open-ended gameplay.

Jaz McDougall of PC Gamer said Minecraft is "intuitively interesting and contagiously fun, with an unparalleled scope for creativity and memorable experiences".

Minecraft surpassed over a million purchases less than a month after entering its beta phase in early 2011.

In November 2011, prior to the game's full release, Minecraft beta surpassed 16 million registered users and 4 million purchases.

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In 2012, Minecraft was the most purchased title on Xbox Live Arcade; it was the fourth most played title on Xbox Live based on average unique users per day.

Minecraft helped improve Microsoft's total first-party revenue by $63 million for the 2015 second quarter.

On its 11th anniversary in May 2020, the company announced that Minecraft had reached over 200 million copies sold across platforms with over 126 million monthly active players.

At Game Developers Choice Awards 2011, Minecraft won awards in the categories for Best Debut Game, Best Downloadable Game and Innovation Award, winning every award for which it was nominated.

On 5 May 2011, Minecraft was selected as one of the 80 games that would be displayed at the Smithsonian American Art Museum as part of The Art of Video Games exhibit that opened on 16 March 2012.

At the 2011 Spike Video Game Awards, Minecraft won the award for Best Independent Game and was nominated in the Best PC Game category.

In 2012, at the British Academy Video Games Awards, Minecraft was nominated in the GAME Award of 2011 category and Persson received The Special Award.

In 2012, Minecraft XBLA was awarded a Golden Joystick Award in the Best Downloadable Game category, and a TIGA Games Industry Award in the Best Arcade Game category.

In 2016, Minecraft placed 6th on Time's The 50 Best Video Games of All Time list.

Minecraft was nominated for the 2013 Kids' Choice Awards for Favorite App, but lost to Temple Run.

Minecraft won "Stream Game of the Year" at inaugural Streamer Awards in 2022.

Minecraft is recognized as one of the first successful games to use an early access model to draw in sales prior to its full release version to help fund development.

Research conducted by the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg School of Communication showed that one-third of Minecraft players learned about the game via Internet videos.

In 2010, Minecraft-related videos began to gain influence on YouTube, often made by commentators.

Minecraft has been referenced by other video games, such as Torchlight II, Borderlands 2, Choplifter HD, Super Meat Boy, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, The Binding of Isaac, The Stanley Parable, FTL: Faster Than Light, and Super Smash Bros.

Possible applications of Minecraft have been discussed extensively, especially in the fields of computer-aided design and education.

Minecraft's tricked 40 million people into learning to use a CAD program.

Minecraft offers an outlet of collaboration in design and could have an impact on the industry.