Minecraft 1.0 Released At MineCon
After years of beta testing, the day has come finally come for Markus “Notch” Persson to release the complete version of Minecraft 1.0. Since the beginning the game has been a huge success and has had a following equivalent to Justin Bieber. 16,634,855 people have registered to play the game and I’m sitting here watching that number increase about one every second. It’s now at 16,634,900 in the time it took me to write that sentence. Of those people, 4,106,358 people have bought the game so far.
It all started with a few simple ideas. Notch says, “I started Minecraft after playing some Infiniminer with a couple of people from TigSource. I realized that a game that simple yet that dynamic had a lot of potential to turn into a really great game, and kept coming up with things I wanted to change and stuff I wanted to add. I had recently quit my job as a game developer to be able to focus more on indie game dev during my free time, and I was looking for a new game to develop. I had a few ideas floating around, but most required really long development times. These two factors led to Minecraft.” And to that we all say, “Thank you for quitting your job, Notch.”
The final release of Minecraft was pretty epic. Notch was on stage and pulled a large Minecraft-esque lever to set the game live. Confetti fells and spirits were high as the crowd went wild. You can find the final game here.
