Mojang have just released a brand new beta build of Minecraft: Pocket Edition, version 0.11.0 beta 6.

The news was announced Johan Bernhardsson, a game developer at Mojang, who has been working on Minecraft: Pocket Edition. Speaking on the social networking website Twitter, Bernhardsson simply revealed that “Beta 6 released” followed by “still no skin packs but we are working on them.”

Despite skin packs not being included the team is one step closer, as a new feature that has been added is the “skin selection player model rotation”. The only other new feature is that players are now able to swap the items then have equipped on the selection bar.

According to Tommaso Checchi Mojang hasn’t managed to fix as many this as they had hoped; commenting “MCPE build 6 is out! We’ve all been part of those ‘large team’ talks so it doesn’t fix too many things, though”. The meetings Checchi is speaking of are synchronization talks between the Mojang team and those based in Redmond who are also working on Minecraft: Pocket Edition.

Here’s a complete list of bug fixes that are included in Build 0.11.0 beta 6:

• Fixed items in chest not saving when quitting
• Creative/survival mode change works again
• Always Day switch works again
• Edited world names are now saved
• Corrected entity duplication in multiplayer
• Spawned players will now have the correct rotation without interpolation
• Creative list was incorrect sometimes after connecting to a server
• Fixed a cause of lag on the world list under slow networks
• Fixed possible attacks by servers on server list
• Fixed crash after death and respawning multiple times
• Fixed crash when disconnecting from server
• Riding non-existent entities on multiplayer could crash the game
• Bubble meter no longer gets reset on death screen

Minecraft: Pocket Edition 0.11 Beta 6 Released

Mason Cohen, 14, left, and Miller Croke, 14, at the Bay Street Theater in Sag Harbor, April 1, 2015. The pair are holding a Minecraft tournament at the theater in May. (Credit: Gordon M. Grant)

When the Bay Street Theater in Sag Harbor wanted to plan a Minecraft computer game competition for tweens and teens, theater staff went straight to the source for help — two 14-year-old gamers from the East End will run Sunday’s faceoff, which Bay Street hopes will also draw spectators.

Eighth-graders Mason Cohen of Sag Harbor and Miller Croke of Southampton have constructed a Minecraft battle…

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With a record-breaking 500 million votes cast from kids around the world, Saturday’s 28th Annual Nickelodeon Kids’ Choice Awards in L.A. was a slime-filled spectacle honoring fan favorites including winners Jennifer Lawrence, SpongeBob SquarePants, One Direction and Nick Jonas.

Hosted by recording artist/actor and newly crowned KCA winner for favorite male singer Nick Jonas, the awards ceremony dished out orange blimps across 21 categories in film, TV, music, video games and books.

Winners were also announced in four new categories— favorite talent competition show, favorite family TV show, most addicting game and favorite new artist—plus a special live vote was held and won by the cast of Nick’s live-action comedy The Thundermans.

With seven million live votes, The Thundermans beat the casts of Bella and the Bulldogs and Nicky, Ricky, Dicky & Dawn and received the honor of taking part in the KCA’s first-ever human slime car wash.

Nickelodeon once again leveraged its multiplatform reach by letting fans vote across Nick.com, the The Nick App on iOS, Kindle and Android mobile devices, and via Nick’s Twitter feed and Facebook page.

Nick Digital platforms also provided exclusive real-time updates and photos from the orange carpet and backstage.

Jennifer Lawrence’s star continues to shine as the A-lister won the favorite female action star award for the second year in a row and her latest Hunger Games film, The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 1 snapped up the KCA for favorite movie.

However, Lawrence didn’t repeat as favorite movie actress. That title was taken this year by The Amazing Spider-Man 2‘s Emma Stone.

Disney snapped up the favorite animated movie award for its Oscar-winning Big Hero 6, the highest-grossing animated film of 2014.

In the television category, long-running Nickelodeon animated series SpongeBob SquarePants won favorite cartoon just as it did last year, and Disney Channel’s Austin & Ally had a big night with three wins—favorite kids TV show, favorite TV actor (Ross Lynch) and favorite TV actress (Laura Marano).

New TV awards went to The Voice for favorite talent competition show and Modern Family for favorite family TV show.

Despite the recent dramatic exit of member Zayn Malik, fans continued to show their love for boy band One Direction, voting them favorite music group for the third year in a row.

Girl group Fifth Harmony won for favorite new artist while the always popular Selena Gomez grabbed the favorite female singer KCA after winning it last year, too.

Rounding out the awards, the phenomenally successful interactive property Minecraft was voted most addicting game, and favorite book went to the Diary of a Wimpy Kid series.

A full list of this year’s winners can be found http://www.nick.com/kids-choice-awards/winners/.

Microsoft said it will not interfere with Mojang’s plans for its upcoming “Minecraft” convention dubbed as Minecon 2015.

The tech giant noted that the event will serve as a great opportunity to learn more about the “Minecraft” community, according to Venture Beat.

After Mojang was acquired by Microsoft in September of last year, followers of the studio and its game worried that the parent company might make significant changes to the firm’s operations.

They also feared that the annual Minecon events might no longer happen since Microsoft stages its own conventions for its properties and games. But according to the company, it has no plans of restricting Mojang activities especially when it comes to connecting with its supporters.

“We’re extremely thankful for our passionate community of players, builders, and content creators whi have made ‘Minecraft’ the global phenomenon it is today,” a Microsoft representative said in a statement.

“It was important to us to help where needed but let Mojang carry on the tradition of Minecon as a meaningful celebration of the ‘Minecraft’ community,” the spokesperson added.

For Microsoft, letting Mojang continue its annual events is a helpful way for the company to connect with “Minecraft” fans. This has been the company’s goal ever since it became the owner of the Swedish video game development studio.

As to what attendees could expect for the upcoming event, Microsoft didn’t reveal the details of Mojang’s plans but said the upcoming Minecon will still feel like the previous conventions.

“Mojang is planning some new surprises, but attendees can expect the same great experience and authentic Minecon experience as past events,” the company spokesperson said.

The two-day Minecon 2015 event will take place on July 4 and 5 and will be held at the Excel London Exhibition and Conference Center in the London Borough of Newham, IGN reported. Tickets for the event will be sold this Friday and Saturday and can be purchased through the Minecon page.

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Minecraft will be given to secondary schools in Northern Ireland as part of a project organised by the annual CultureTECH festival and funded by the Department of Culture, Arts and Leisure.

The hugely popular building-block game will be supplied to 200 schools and 30 libraries and community organisations, which will all receive download codes for MinecraftEdu, the educational version of the game.

Launched in 2011 by Swedish studio Mojang, Minecraft has sold more than 60m copies on PCs, smartphones, tablets and consoles. It generates a vast blocky landscape, then allows players to freely explore, constructing buildings and mining for minerals that can be crafted into useful items.

The game was quickly recognised for its educational potential, offering children a compelling way of learning about architecture, agriculture and renewable resources. Copies soon started to appear on classroom computers around the world.

“The level of engagement is the first thing you notice ,” said Mark Nagurski, chief executive of CultureTECH. “This is work that the kids really want to do and if you’re able to harness that enthusiasm, energy and creativity you end up with a pretty significant learning opportunity.

“The other exciting thing for us is the scalability and ‘sharability’ that Minecraft offers. If someone creates an engaging way of teaching, say, ancient history, using Minecraft, that can immediately be shared with all the other teachers using the game. You can already see that [happening] with things like Computercraft and we hope this project will add significantly to that resource.”

Soon after the release of Minecraft, educational game developers in the US and Finland formed a company named TeacherGaming to create a classroom edition, complete with teaching tools and hosting software to allow seamless connected play between pupils on different machines.

TeacherGaming claims that MinecraftEdu is already used by more than 3,000 teachers in hundreds of schools around the world, in classes ranging from languages to the history of art.

In 2013, one Swedish school made the game a compulsory part of its curriculum. Later the same year, Google partnered with quantum mechanic Spyridon Michalakis to create qCraft, a version of Minecraft designed to teach children about quantum mechanics.

“Last week we worked with Artichoke and The Space to recreate, in Minecraft, a version of Burning Man artist David Best’s ‘Temple’ in Minecraft,” said Nagurski.

“The real world Temple was a 70ft structure in the city that was ceremonially burnt. When we took it into the schools we were able to give young people a chance to create their own versions of the Temple, working alongside the artist. We’ve seen Minecraft being used to teach everything from coding to physics but I think that there’s a real opportunity to develop more of these kind of creative projects too.”

This is the first time, however, that Minecraft has been distributed across an entire region.

CultureTECH has said that it will work with various education partners to provide training and support to teachers who want to use the programme.

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“Minecraft” fans recently received amazing news from Mojang. The game developer announced that the fan convention called Minecon will return this year after not existing since 2014. The annual event that was normally attended by over 10,000 avid “Minecraft” fans since it began in Las Vegas in 2010 will once again attract thousands of fans around the world. This time, it will be held at the ExCeL Convention Centre in London on July 4 and 5.

There is limited information shared about what the convention will offer this year, but Mojang recently announced that those who will attend the event will be able to participate in several panels that will discuss the future of the sandbox game. Also, several exhibits can be expected where innovative stuff will be displayed featuring the “Minecraft” principle.

 However, the most concrete announcement from Mojang about the event is the schedule of the ticket release as well as information on where and how to purchase it. According to Mojang‘s official website, the first 5,000 tickets will be sold on Friday, March 27, at exactly 6 p.m. GMT. The next set of 5,000 tickets will go on sale starting 12 p.m. on Saturday, March 28.

Each ticket will be sold for £129, and can only be purchased through Eventbrite. Each individual can only purchase up to six tickets at a time, and they have to provide the name of the ticket holder when making the purchase to make the order complete. The tickets cannot be resold, and only those individuals whose name appears on the ticket will be admitted to the convention.

Mojang also tied up with several hotels within the vicinity of the venue where attendees can book at discounted rates. They also allow children aged three and below to enter the premises for free, but those aged 14 or younger must purchase their tickets and have an accompanying adult before being allowed to attend the event.

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Mother leaves full-time supermarket job to make thousands as a celebrity on MINECRAFT (now even her daughters’ friends want her autograph!)

• Staci Northfield, 27, from Cambridge, left her job as a Sainsbury’s cashier
• Mum-of-two is now a Minecraft celebrity, narrating videos on YouTube
• Has 111,000 subscribers on YouTube and 34,000 followers on Twitter
• Earns the same as her partner, who is a chef at a Cambridge University 

A mother has given up work to gain an international following for her making videos of the addictive block-building game Minecraft.

Staci Northfield, 27, from Cambridge, says she earns more from narrating her digital adventures on the hugely popular game than she did as a full-time supermarket cashier.

As her online alter ego, Salem’s Lady, she has amassed 111,000 subscribers on YouTube and even meets her eager fans at special conventions.

‘It’s like a double life’ – Staci has found it strange to consolidate both her real life as a parent and also her life and work as a gamer in Minecraft

The mother-of-two uses Twitter to keep in contact with her 34,000 followers and – while she won’t reveal her new earnings – says she makes almost as much as her partner Jonathan Brown, 33, who is a full-time chef at a university in Cambridge.

She said: ‘I got started when one of my friends told me it was a really great game to play. It looked really boring but she showed me a guy doing videos and he made it a bit more interesting.

‘I started off building a house, which turned into a castle, then a castle with a railway, and from then on it was; “I love this game, it’s endless”. You can build anything.

‘I never thought it would be possible playing games for a living, and now there are children who want me to sign things for them.’

Even Staci is surprised by her own success, saying: ‘I hate the sound of my own voice, and I thought they were going to hate it, but a lot of the audience are in America, and they seem to love the British accent.

Staci posts hugely popular minecraft videos as SalemsLady

‘I love this game, it’s endless’ – Former supermarket cashier, Staci, has an online alter-ego called Salem’s Lady, which she takes on adventures in the block-building video game

‘There have been a few people around from the start and I always try to make a little more effort for them but sometimes it’s hard because you can’t speak to everybody.’

Staci gave up her Sainsbury’s job to look after her two daughters Holly, six, and Rachel, eight, but struggled for money two years ago and decided to go back to work.

But while she was looking for jobs online she became hooked on the addictive block-building game so much she began making the videos.

Despite YouTubing as a hobby she soon realised she could make some serious cash and gave up the job hunt altogether.

Staci spends two or three hours in the morning making the videos before she edits them in the afternoon and helps other players with any queries.

She spent last weekend at a gaming convention in London and has had to get used to meeting her excited fans in the flesh.

Staci added: ‘My youngest daughter just doesn’t understand it, she just likes being in the videos.

‘But my eldest loves it, her friends are fans and when she goes to school they all know who I am.

‘It’s been steadily growing over the past two years and then it’s really snowballed recently, I can’t believe it.

‘I earn enough to get by so I don’t have to go to work and can pay my bills, and if I am needing to go to school I can do that.

‘I am always available if someone needs me, it’s a real perk.

‘It’s really, really strange, I have to switch off from the gaming world and be a parent again, but I can go to my children’s school and none of the parents know who I am.

‘It’s like a double life.’

She says she earns the same as her husband Jonathan, who works full-time as a chef in a university in Cambridge

For most people, the colorful numbers and letters that filled the computer screen would be completely baffling, but Markus felt right at home. The game was called Dwarf Fortress and it had become a cult favorite in indie circles. Markus had downloaded it to try it out himself and watched, entranced by the simple text world drawn up in front of him.

A couple of weeks had passed since Markus started working at Jalbum and his thoughts were circling full speed around the game he’d promised himself he’d work on. Like when he was a child and would run home from school to his LEGOs, he now spent almost all his free time in front of his home computer. He combed the Internet in search of inspiration for his project; the heavy labor—the coding—could begin only after he figured out what kind of game he wanted to create. The idea for Minecraft began to take shape in his encounter with Dwarf Fortress.

In Dwarf Fortress the player is tasked with helping a group of dwarf warriors build a fortress in bedrock. The player controls a group of dwarves that can each be put to various tasks (chopping down trees, mining ore from the mountain, cooking, making furniture, fishing, for example) or made to protect the fortress from monsters such as evil vampires, giant spiders, trolls, and wolves. The basic game mechanics are similar to many other strategy games—The Sims, for example, where the player manages a household, or the Facebook game FarmVille, where the objective is to get a farm to flourish. But Dwarf Fortress is different from most other games of the genre in a couple of ways.

First of all, the graphics are highly stylized. The Dwarf Fortress game world is completely made up of letters, numbers, and other symbols that can be typed on a regular keyboard. In this game, a terrifying giant spider is not a detailed 3-D model but a simple gray letter S. Minerals to be mined from the rock are represented by the British pound sign, beds are pale-yellow crosses, grassy meadows and trees are green dots and triangles, and so on. Small, smiling faces of different colors represent the dwarves. Many Dwarf Fortress players maintain that the simple graphics make the game more immersive—for what giant spider could possibly be scarier than the one you imagine?—but for beginners it is, to say the least, a deterrent. Just interpreting the information that’s presented on the screen demands a lot of study, and it’s not a wild guess that most people who download Dwarf Fortress give up after only a couple of minutes.

But the simple graphics are not there just to scare off all but the most devoted players. They also give the game’s developer time to focus on other things. Great game play and interesting mechanics are always more important that good-looking graphics, maintains Dwarf Fortress‘s creator, Tarn Adams. It’s also the reason he has spent several years adjusting and tweaking the balance in Dwarf Fortress and the nearly infinite number of situations that can arise from the combinations of thousands of different objects, creatures, and occurrences. For the person who takes the time to understand the game’s mysteries, it becomes a world that’s almost got a life of its own. In an interview with the New York Times, Adams tells of his surprise when he discovered that the carp he programmed into the game also turned out to be dangerous monsters with an appetite for dwarf warriors:

“We’d written them as carnivorous and roughly the same size as dwarves, so that just happened, and it was great.”

Judging by the popularity of the game—Dwarf Fortress has been downloaded more than a million times—many agree.

Secondly, Dwarf Fortress is a game that is almost completely open ended. Or rather, the game ends when the player dies, which happens often in the cruel, underground world of dwarves. Other than that, the player decides what to build and how. The game puts a bunch of happy dwarves, tools, and opportunities on the table and waves good-bye with one simple request: have fun. The rest is up to the player.

***

Markus had quit his secure job at Midasplayer to do just that. Have fun. He loved the indie scene that had sprung up in the gaming world. While it was hard for him to put his finger on exactly what it was that attracted him, he felt at home there, much more so than as a developer with one of the industry’s large, established studios, that much he knew.
Markus had hated working at two of Sweden’s most successful game companies.

His favorite online hangout was the game forum TIGSource, a meeting place for indie developers, where Markus (known as Notch in that context) quickly found a group of friends and acquaintances to talk games with. He loved the burning creativity of the indie scene, its focus on new, interesting gaming concepts rather than on elaborate graphics and expensive manuscripts. He liked that each programmer controlled his own projects entirely.

An outside observer who saw his career at this time would probably shake their head. Markus, who had dreamt of being a game developer since childhood, had had the privilege of working at two of Sweden’s most successful game companies. Avalanche developed Hollywood-like productions, with nearly unlimited budgets. Midasplayer was in the forefront of development and experimented vigorously with the new potential of the web. Still, Markus had hated them both so much that he quit. What was it that rubbed him the wrong way?

Maybe it was more than just getting free of the boss who told him what to do day in and day out. “Indie” literally means independent, that an individual can develop a game without a large company doling out commissions. Markus’s own interpretation of the concept is slightly different. He feels that indie is a matter of self-image. It’s about creating games for their own sake, where the goal isn’t to make money but to make the best game possible.

In many ways, that is a more telling definition. Except for some incredible exceptions, the gaming industry differs from other creative businesses in that the foremost game designers are seldom recognized for their work in the way famous musicians or film directors are. In the gaming world, it’s the publishers or studios that are recognized after a well-received game release, seldom the individuals. That’s because game development is, in most cases, a collective achievement. In a project with several hundred programmers, it’s almost impossible to point out just one person as the brain or the visionary behind the whole thing. In the indie scene, on the other hand, a single programmer can put together a game of his or her own and stand behind everything from the basic vision to the implementation. You could say that the indie scene, being closer to artistry than it is to systems development, has, for the first time, given the individual game developer an identity to embrace. Markus has never thought of himself as a Java programmer, graphic artist, or musician. He sees himself as a game maker, plain and simple. The indie scene was the only place where he could be just that.

While working in web development at Jalbum, Markus resigned himself to the fact that his monthly paycheck wouldn’t be coming from developing games, but it was still better to work on something else during the day in order to be able to invest his evenings and weekends in his own projects. Initially, he had seen Jalbum mostly as his ticket out of Midasplayer. Now, a couple of weeks later, he was actually enjoying it. He had developed a friendly acquaintance with Carl Manneh, the CEO. Markus recalls that his first impression of Manneh was that of a typical businessman, and though Markus wasn’t the least bit interested in business, Carl Manneh’s enthusiasm was impressive. He was young, quick thinking, and had already, at barely thirty years old, run three companies. The first one sold shoelaces, the second was a recording studio in central Stockholm. The third was Jalbum.

And he ran the company really well, in Markus’s opinion. Carl was an entrepreneurial soul with a good head for the business logic of the Internet. Besides that, he understood Markus’s ambition to develop games. He was even interested, asking questions about projects and offering some of his own thoughts. Carl stood for something completely different from what the old bosses at Midasplayer had. He encouraged Markus and made sure that he had the time and the opportunity to balance his job with what he really wanted to do.

Besides Dwarf Fortress, there were two other games that fascinated Markus at that time: RollerCoaster Tycoon and Dungeon Keeper. RollerCoaster Tycoon is an amusement-park simulator, where the player builds roller coasters; Dungeon Keeper is a strategy game, where the player digs cave passages and populates them with monsters and ingenious traps as protection against attacking plunderers and adventurers.

In RollerCoaster Tycoon, Markus liked the ability to build, quickly and easily, original, impressive constructions. He could spend hours dreaming up complicated roller coasters, and he wanted to engender that same creativity in his own project. Dungeon Keeper‘s contribution had mainly to do with atmosphere. Fantasy-type, torch-lit catacombs are just as much a cliché in the game world as are space battles and dwarf warriors, but it was still an environment that Markus loved. Few games had captured the nerve-tingling sensation of exploring dark, spooky caves and dungeons as well as Bullfrog’s classic strategy game from 1997, in his opinion. From Dwarf Fortress, he wanted to bring the exciting feeling of depth and life that Tarn Adams’s cult game was so good at conveying. His own game would feel more like a world to explore and to try to survive in than a narrative, segmented into ready-made challenges.

Then there was Wurm Online of course. The similarities between Minecraft and the game Markus designed with Rolf Jansson a couple of years earlier are unmistakable. In both, the player has almost complete freedom to alter the world according to his or her own whim. Like Minecraft, there are few built-in tasks or challenges to undertake in Wurm Online. The player is expected to create his or her own goals for the game alone or, if so desired, in collaboration with others.

In the spring of 2007, Markus dropped out of Wurm Online. Rolf had moved from Stockholm to Motala a few years earlier, the two were seeing less of each other, and Markus knew that the big decisions about the game’s development were increasingly in Rolf’s hands. Besides, his Midasplayer job kept him busy.

Rolf was disappointed. Wurm Online had just begun to pull in enough money to give him a decent full-time salary. The sudden resignation of one of the game’s founders, the friend with whom he’d worked for more than three years, was a huge blow. Initially, Markus had a bad conscience about it—it was hard not to feel like he had left his old friend in the lurch. He retained a small part of his ownership in the shared company, but turned over the rest to Rolf. A Band-Aid on the sore if nothing else, he thought.
After Markus became familiar with Infiniminer, he immediately sat down and began recoding his own game.

But now, in front of the computer with Dwarf Fortress on the screen, Markus’s thoughts were fully focused on the next project—on amusement parks, medieval catacombs, and dwarf warriors, that is to say. All that remained was to put together something new and entertaining.

At first, Markus sketched a game world that was, like many other strategy games, viewed from above. In Markus’s game, the building and exploring would occur in a three-dimensional world a good deal more inviting and easy to understand than that of Dwarf Fortress. But the player would still control the action like an omnipotent god with a mouse, rather than seeing the world from the perspective of one’s avatar.

That changed a couple of days later. Like most evenings after work, Markus was on the computer when he stumbled upon an indie game he hadn’t tried before. It was called Infiniminer. Markus downloaded the game, installed and clicked it into motion, and then almost fell off his chair. “Oh my God,” he thought. “This is genius.”

Like Minecraft, Infiniminer involves digging and building. The game is enacted in square, blocky worlds automatically generated before each play. Every individual block can be picked loose from the environment and assembled into something new. Certain blocks, often the ones deep in the ground, contain rare minerals. Others are just dirt and rock to be dug through in the search for treasure.

Recognize it? No surprise there. For anyone who has played Minecraft, the first encounter with Infiniminer is eerily familiar. The game was developed by American programmer Zachary Barth, and was released in late April 2009, just weeks before Minecraft saw the light of day. The two games’ graphics are nearly identical. There are brown dirt blocks, gray stone, and orange, bubbling lava that runs slowly over the ground.

Infiniminer was originally intended as a multiplayer game, with different teams competing to collect the most precious minerals in the shortest time. Buildings were used as a way of sabotaging the competitors’ progress. But eventually players discovered that building was more fun than competing for points and they began to spend their time creating houses, castles, and other structures instead. Infiniminer quickly developed a devoted following, which included Markus, and in the spring of 2009, most signs pointed to Zachary Barth’s game being on its way to a breakthrough. But it didn’t get there, because of a particularly unhappy turn of events.

Barely a month after Infiniminer was released, the game’s source code was leaked onto the Internet. This meant that anyone with enough programming skills could make changes to the game, and soon, innumerable downloadable copies and variations of Infiniminer began cropping up. For Zachary Barth, the problem was not economic—he had never hoped to make a ton of money from Infiniminer—it was that he lost control of how his game developed. Each of the variations of Infiniminer circulating on the Internet had small, incompatible differences. Two players with different versions installed could never be sure that they would be able to play with each other. Zachary Barth’s plans of building a large and living multiplayer community around Infiniminer became impossible. The American programmer made the best of the situation and released Infiniminer as open source code, and gave his blessing to the game’s fans to continue developing it as they wished.

After Markus became familiar with Infiniminer, he immediately sat down and began recoding his own game. He changed the third-person perspective to a first-person point of view and redid the graphics to make them even more blockish. It was a step away from the traditional strategy game he’d picked from his models and toward a more adventure-oriented setup. After a couple of days of frantic coding, Markus leaned back in his chair, satisfied as he saw the puzzle pieces beginning to fall into place. Building, digging, and exploring took on a totally new dimension when players saw the world through the eyes of their avatars.

In early May 2009, Markus uploaded a video recording (above) of a very early version of Minecraft on YouTube. It didn’t look like much more than a half-finished system for generating worlds and Markus gleefully jumping around inside it, but still, the essence of it hinted at how the game might look when it was done.

“This is a very early test of an Infiniminer clone I’m working on. It will have more resource management and materials, if I ever get around to finishing it,” is Markus’s description of the clip.

Someone on the fringes might regard what Markus did as intellectual-property theft. Without beating around the bush, he revealed where he found his inspiration and even went as far as to call Minecraft a clone of an existing game. But game developers, more than other kinds of artists, often find their starting point in an existing idea that they then work on, change, and polish. All studios, large and small, keep tabs on what their competitors are doing and frequently borrow from their games. Still, game developers seldom accuse others of plagiarizing. Almost all platform games originate from the mechanics that Nintendo put in place in the first Super Mario Bros., released in 1985. And more or less all role-playing games build on the structure that was developed in games such as The Bard’s Tale. That’s why Zachary Barth refuses to single out Markus as a thief. He even speaks about how he himself used Team Fortress 2 and the indie game Motherload as inspiration for Infiniminer. Actually, he’s tired of the constant questions about if he feels ripped off considering the millions of players and dollars that Minecraft has pulled in.

“The act of borrowing ideas is integral to the creative process. There are games that came before Infiniminer and there are games that will come after Minecraft. That’s how it works,” says Barth.

About this time Markus, after discussing the matter with some friends at the TIGSource forum, decided to call his game Minecraft. The name was a combination of the words mine, for mining ore in shafts, and craft, as in building or creating something. The name is also a wink at Blizzard’s strategy games Warcraft and StarCraft, and the enormously successful online role-playing game World of Warcraft. Initially, the game had the subtitle Order of the Stone, a reference to the online series Order of the Stick, of which Markus was a fan, but that idea was scrapped before the game was released to the public.

Markus was convinced that he was onto something big, but convincing the world around him of the excellence of his game was not so easy. A bunch of different ideas merged into Minecraft, and explaining them without any kind of demonstration was complicated. Over coffee with his mom, Markus attempted to describe in sweeping gestures the new project he was working on. He told her about the building, the exploration, and the atmosphere, and then explained how the game would be both easily accessible and complicated at the same time. Maybe it could develop into something great, he thought aloud. Maybe he should give notice at work and focus entirely on Minecraft. Ritva smiled slightly. It sounded like a really good idea, she’d said to her son. But maybe he should start by working only part-time? It wasn’t entirely easy to support oneself on game development alone. He’d said that himself before.

In truth, Markus’s idea was all Greek to her. Plus she remembered the year after high school, when he didn’t look for work, didn’t study, and barely went outdoors for days at a time. What would happen if he became just as obsessed with another project, something that could be just as important to him as building with LEGOs had been when he was in elementary school but that earned him next to nothing? She was worried, and yet, she saw how his eyes lit up when he talked about the game. He became confident, self-assured.

Elin better understood what Markus was thinking. She was among the first in the world to try out a working version of Minecraft. As soon as it was ready, Markus sent it to Elin and asked her to play. When she logged in and started up the world, what she got was basically a tech demo—a world of blocks beneath a blue sky. But Markus’s intentions were immediately evident to her. A couple of minutes of digging and building and she was entrenched in the game.

“This is SO much fun!” she said to her boyfriend.

From that moment on, Elin was Markus’s game tester. Every time he added a new feature to Minecraft, he sent her the latest version. Markus often stood watching over Elin’s shoulder while she played, listening intently to her comments. If Elin liked something he’d done, he seemed to reason, the rest of the world would probably like it, too.
Click to Open Overlay GalleryMinecraft. Image courtesy Mojang

Even before Minecraft was shown to the public, Markus had made a couple of important decisions that would have a huge influence on the game’s continued development. First, he wanted to document the development openly and in continuous dialogue with players, both his semiprofessional colleagues at TIGSource and any others who might be interested. Markus updated his blog often with information about changes in Minecraft and his thoughts about the game’s future. He invited everyone who played the game to give him comments and suggestions for improvements. In addition to that, he released updates often, in accordance with the Swedish saying “hellre än bra” (meaning someone who prefers spontaneity over perfection). As soon as a new function or bug-fix was in place, he made it available via his site, asking players for help in testing and improving it.

Second, Markus knew from the beginning that he eventually wanted people to pay for Minecraft. In the back of his mind were his talks with Jakob at Midasplayer and their dream of starting their own game studio, so it seemed only natural to put a price on his game. And it was better to do it as soon as possible.
When the game was completed, the price would double.

It doesn’t sound very controversial, but the fact is that Markus’s decision went against most of the current trends in the gaming and Internet world. Many technology prophets talk about the road to riches on the web being through charging as little as possible for your products, preferably nothing at all. At most of the well-known Internet companies, for example Google and Facebook, the cash comes mainly from ads. In the gaming industry, the trend points to micropayments. Rovio-developed Angry Birds, which costs one dollar at App Store, is maybe the best-known example. Another is the Swedish-developed online game Battlefield Heroes. It’s a variation on the popular game that’s free to play, but players can buy new equipment and better weapons for a few dollars each.

Markus disregarded all such things. Minecraft was to cost around thirteen dollars during the alpha phase, the first period of development, mainly because it was a sum that he felt comfortable with. When the game was completed, the price would double.

“The reason that I released the game so early was that I would never have been able to finish it otherwise. Charging money was the same thing. I knew that I would never feel that it was good enough to put a price tag on. So I charged from the start,” says Markus today.

Anyone looking for more refined business logic behind what would become the most profitable gaming phenomenon of the last decade is on a fool’s errand. Markus is notoriously disinterested in business and economics. When someone asks him to reveal the secret behind Minecraft‘s unbelievable financial success, he just smiles and shrugs his shoulders. He just followed his gut, he says, did what felt right and what worked for him. To the question of what was the most important thing he learned from Minecraft‘s early sales, Markus answers:

“I understood that an orange splash where it says ‘half price’ works really well. That’s what I had on the site during the alpha phase.”

***

On May 17, 2009, Markus uploaded the first playable version of Minecraft onto the indie forum TIGSource. “It’s an alpha version, so it might crash sometimes,” he warned. Other forum writers immediately began exploring the blocky world that Markus presented to them. There was a lot of digging, building, and discussing. The game crashed at times, but even at that early stage, it’s clear that Minecraft was exerting an unusual magnetism on players.

It took just a couple of minutes for the first reactions to come. “Oh hell, that’s pretty cool,” someone wrote. “I hope you make something really good out of this, dude, I think it has a lot of potential,” another encouraged. Barely an hour after Markus uploaded the game, the first image of a Minecraft construction was posted in the forum thread. “This is way too much fun. I built a bridge,” wrote the person who uploaded the image. Others filled in, adding their own constructions. A castle, a fortress, a secret treasure chest. Someone wrote that he’d tried to make a boat, but the result was too ugly to make public. Someone else built a giant phallus, but never uploaded an image, just relied on a vivid description of the work: “It was such a thing of awe that Firefox decided to pack it in before I could snap a shot of that mofo.”

Markus followed the postings with great interest, listening to bug reports and discussing Minecraft‘s future with others on the forum. Friends and family remember how he told them enthusiastically about the warm welcome Minecraft had received. Many games are uploaded on TIGSource every day, but few struck a chord with the audience the way Markus’s game had. In his head, a ray of hope began to shine. Maybe he was on the right track this time.

In early June, Markus described his intended pricing model on his blog. Those who paid for the game were promised access to all future updates at no extra cost. A free edition of Minecraft would still be available, but only the current half-finished version of the game. For those who bought a copy of Minecraft immediately, there was a discount. When the game entered beta-development, the price would be raised to $20, and the finished version would cost $26. On June 12, Markus opened for orders. Twenty-four hours later, he clicked on the sales statistics and could hardly believe his eyes. Fifteen people had paid for the game. In just twenty-four hours, more than $150 had landed in his PayPal account.

Elin and Jakob were two people who really noticed the effect the early sales successes had on Markus. Elin remembers how he obsessively followed the growing numbers of games sold. She hesitates to describe him as nervous, but clearly Markus was very focused on the early reactions to the game. Seven games purchased per day felt unbelievable.

Initially, Markus dismissed these sales as a passing fad. But every day the number of discussion threads about Minecraft on the game developer forum grew larger, and increasing numbers of people visited them. All the while, the sales counter continued ticking upward, slowly at first, then faster. At home in Sollentuna, Markus did a quick calculation: If I can sell more than twenty games a day, that’s enough for something approaching a decent salary, he thought, and made up his mind. Then I’ll quit my day job. Then I’m really doing this.

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On March 28, 2011, a man who calls himself Kurt J. Mac loaded a new game of Minecraft. As the landscape filled in around his character, Mac surveyed the blocky, pixellated trees, the cloud-draped mountains, and the waddling sheep. Then he started walking. His goal for the day was simple: to reach the end of the universe.

Nearly three years later, Mac, who is now thirty-one, is still walking. He has trekked more than seven hundred virtual kilometres in a hundred and eighty hours. At his current pace, Mac will not reach the edge of the world, which is now nearly twelve thousand kilometres away, for another twenty-two years.

In the four years since its initial release, Minecraft has become a phenomenon that is played by more than forty million people around the world, on computers, smartphones, and video-game consoles. It is primarily a game about human expression: a giant, Lego-style construction set in which every object can be broken down into its constituent elements and rebuilt in the shape of a house, an airship, a skyscraper, or whatever else a player can create.

Minecraft’s universe is procedurally generated, meaning that an algorithm places each asset—every hill, mountain, cave, river, sheep, and so on—in a unique arrangement every time a new game is loaded, so that no two players’ worlds are exactly alike. Markus Persson, the game’s creator, planned for these worlds to be infinitely large: if a player kept walking in a single direction, the game would create more of the world in front of him, like an engineer forever laying track for an advancing train.

But, at extreme distances from a player’s starting point, a glitch in the underlying mathematics causes the landscape to fracture into illogical shapes and patterns. “Pretty early on, when implementing the ‘infinite’ worlds, I knew the game would start to bug out at long distances,” Persson told me. “But I did the math on how likely it was people would ever reach it, and I decided it was far away enough that the bugs didn’t matter.”

In March, 2011, Persson wrote a blog post about the problem in the game’s source code and the mysterious area where Minecraft’s world begins to warp and disintegrate, which he calls the Far Lands. Around that time, inspired by the legions of Minecraft players who record and broadcast their adventures, Mac started a YouTube channel to document his virtual exploits. As he cast about for a fresh angle to distinguish his episodes from those of other YouTube Minecraft-casters, he came upon Persson’s post. It was exactly what Mac had been searching for: he changed the name of his YouTube channel to Far Lands or Bust!, and he set off to see them for himself. “In my ignorance, I thought the journey might take a year or so,” Mac told me. “Had I known that the Far Lands were so many thousands of kilometres away, I might have been more hesitant.”

Mac’s preparations for the hike were basic. He gathered the materials to craft a sword, for protection, and a pickax, for digging rudimentary shelters to hide from the game’s lethal nocturnal terrors. “Most important, I brought a compass,” he said. “The compass always points toward the original spawn point. That way, I would know that, as long as I walk in the direction opposite the needle’s point, I am headed in the right direction.”

Mac has filmed his entire odyssey, breaking it up into separate YouTube episodes, which now make up four seasons. “The YouTube format serves the journey well, allowing the viewer to experience the entire adventure along with me,” he said. “Also, if anyone had doubts as to whether or not I was making this trek to the Far Lands without cheating, they could go back and watch all of the footage.” But Mac soon realized that he would have to fill each episode with commentary, both to engage his audience and to stave off loneliness. “The series transformed into a sort of podcast, where the topics I talk about might have little to do with the journey itself,” he said. “Of course, it is always exciting when Minecraft re-grabs my attention with a perilous cliff, a zombie attack, or a memorable landscape, and I remember the journey I’m on.”

By one measure, Mac’s endeavor is motivated by the same spirit that propels any explorer toward the far reaches of the unknown. Today, we live in a world meticulously mapped by satellites and Google cars, making uncharted virtual lands some of the last places that can satisfy a yearning for the beyond, as well as locations where you are simply, as Mac puts it, “first.” “My viewers and I are the only people to ever see these places exactly as they are,” he said. “Once we walk past, we will never see them again.”

While the premise of walking in a single direction through a video game for hundreds of hours may seem banal, Minecraft has a special ability to create unscripted character drama. In almost every one of Far Lands or Bust’s three hundred or so episodes, each of which lasts for around thirty-five minutes, Mac encounters something of note. “On June 6, 2011, in episode thirty-two, I tamed a wolf,” he recalled. “He quickly became a fan favorite and my only companion on the trip. Unfortunately, on the final day of the season, Wolfie, as I’d named him, mysteriously disappeared during a break.” Mac presumed that Wolfie had been glitched out of the game, and his disappearance lent a sour note to the season finale. But, in an unlikely plot twist, Mac was reunited with the Wolfie during the first episode of season four, and the pair continued the journey together.

When Mac began his quest, he was employed as a Web designer, but, as his channel attracted more viewers, he started generating enough advertising revenue to quit his job and make virtual exploration his sole career. In a way, his viewers have become his patrons, funding his trip in exchange for reports and updates, which are interesting enough to elicit their continued support. The channel’s success—today, it has more than three hundred thousand subscribers—has been such that Kurt adopted the pseudonym Mac to conceal his identity from fans who might try to locate his house, in the Chicago suburbs.

Persson is an avid supporter of the Far Lands journey. “It was one of those things that kind of slowly crept into my awareness,” he said. “I heard about it from various places and eventually got around to watching an episode.” Mac met Persson in Paris, in 2012, at the game’s annual conference. “I think, despite no longer being involved in Minecraft’s development, Notch is very amused at the various ways people have chosen to play his game,” Mac said. Persson watches Mac’s videos while working. “I find it strangely calming and Zen-like,” he said. “It makes for an excellent background to programming. It’s not something I would ever attempt myself, though. I don’t think I have that kind of personality.”

In June, 2011, Mac partnered with the charity Child’s Play, which aims to improve the lives of hospitalized children by providing toys and games to more than seventy hospitals worldwide. “The viewers have always motivated me with their generosity,” he said. “It has allowed the series to become more than just about reaching the Far Lands in a video game, but actually making a difference in the real world.”

The charitable cause also gave Mac a reason to withhold how far he has travelled, in order to maintain a sense of mystery. “I now only ever press F3 to display my coördinates when certain fund-raising goals have been met.” When the first fund-raising goal, eighty-two hundred dollars, was met, on November 14, 2011, Mac discovered he had travelled more than two hundred and ninety-two thousand metres. “After the next goal, twenty-nine thousand two hundred and twenty dollars, was met, on August 12, 2012, I pressed F3, to find I had travelled six hundred and ninety-nine thousand four hundred and ninety-two metres,” he said. To date, Mac’s journey has raised more than two hundred and fifty thousand dollars for charity.

The date and time of Mac’s arrival time into the Far Lands is much debated. It’s agreed that in a completely flat Minecraft world it would take a player eight hundred and twenty hours of continuous walking to reach the edge of the universe. But Mac is playing in a world that’s interrupted by mountains, oceans, and other obstacles, all of which affect the pace of his travel. And he often stops to admire his surroundings. “Some say it will take more than three thousand episodes to reach my destination at my current rate,” he said. “But I never really take the time to think about it myself. My mantra has always been that this is about the journey and not the destination.”

Nevertheless, Mac is already beginning to see clues that he is on course. “I’ve started to experience some of the effects of travelling so far from spawn,” he said. “Items and entities are somewhat disjointed from the terrain around them, causing a jitter as I walk.” Some people expect these problems to increase as Mac walks farther from his starting point, and some think that the game will be unplayable long before he reaches the Far Lands. Mac is more philosophical about it. “We will see when we get there,” he says.

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AUSTIN, TEXAS – Telltale Games is one of the best companies in the business when it comes to story-driven games, but what about when games have no story? The developer recently announced that it would partner with Mojang to bring its cinematic brand of adventure games to the Minecraft universe, and has now revealed a few more details about what fans can expect.

I attended a Telltale Games panel at SXSW 2015 and heard the developers talk about both the challenges and rewards of creating emotional, mature adventure adaptations such as The Walking Dead, The Wolf Among us and Game of Thrones. The company actually has a long history of doing lighthearted games, however, which is why it considers itself a good fit for a narrative-heavy Minecraft installment.

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The developers were quick to clarify that while Minecraft: Story Mode would be a story set in the Minecraft world, it would not be a story about Minecraft, per se. The setting is deliberately vague and open-ended, more about what players create than a cohesive narrative to tie the world together.

One audience member pointed out that Telltale usually honors the elements of its source material, such as introducing new fairytale characters in The Wolf Among Us or incorporating anarchic humor into Tales from the Borderlands. He asked whether Telltale Minecraft would allow players to design and share their own creations: a concept central to the Minecraft mythos. Telltale did not offer a specific response, but agreed that creativity and collaboration are, indeed, at the heart of the game, and it would try to respect that.

Lydia Winters, a Mojang representative, joined the Telltale team onstage and confirmed that Mojang has been heavily involved in the creation of Telltale’s Minecraft adaptation. Telltale generally collaborates closely with its partners to ensure that the game stays true to the spirit of the original property. Winters was also reluctant to give away exact story details, save to say that it would not focus on Steve, the generally accepted name for the player character of the main game.

Telltale also let drop a few hints about Super Show, its new original IP. The developer will collaborate with a number of film studios, including Lion’s Gate, to produce a variety of multimedia adventures. Each month, players will receive a playable Telltale episode, as well as a watchable episode from the film studio. There may also be other components to each story, although Telltale would not say exactly what they would be.

Walking Dead fans may also be pleased to know that The Walking Dead Season 3 is definitely on the way, and it might arrive sooner rather than later.

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