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Before it had its iconic name, Minecraft was a scrappy little project Notch was calling Cave Game while he tinkered with it in his spare time. He was openly borrowing ideas from Dwarf Fortress, Infiniminer and even RollerCoaster Tycoon, mashing them together into something nobody had quite seen before. Funny to think the biggest game on the planet started life sounding like a budget dungeon crawler.
Notch didn't spend years agonising over the first version of Minecraft, he banged out the alpha in just six days back in May 2009. It was barebones compared to what we play now, but the core idea of punching blocks and building whatever you wanted was already there, ready to snowball into a global obsession.
Notch selling Minecraft to Microsoft wasn't some long boardroom saga, by his own account it kicked off after he vented his frustration with the community in a single tweet in June 2014. A few months later Microsoft had bought Mojang for $2.5 billion, and Notch, along with co-founders Carl Manneh and Jakob Porser, walked away from the company entirely.
Long after the sale, Mojang quietly stripped out some of the splash text jokes that used to flash across the main menu, including 'Made by Notch!', 'The Work of Notch!' and a cheeky '110813!' referencing his old wedding date. He's still credited in the closing credits, but that little nod on the title screen is gone for good.
Somewhere around 2023 Minecraft crossed the 300 million copies sold mark, officially making it the best-selling video game ever recorded, according to Guinness World Records. By 2025 that number had climbed past 350 million, and there's still no real sign of it slowing down more than a decade and a half after launch.
A default Minecraft world stretches out to a 60,000km wide square, which sounds abstract until you realise that's several times larger than the entire surface area of Earth. Nobody is ever walking the whole thing, but it's a wild bit of trivia to drop on someone who thinks they've 'explored everything' in their save file.
Long before world borders were a thing, players who walked far enough from spawn in older versions would hit the Far Lands, a stretch of terrain around 12.5 million blocks out where the game's math simply broke down into towering, glitched cliffs. It took a YouTuber a legitimate ten-day walk in 2020 just to reach it, since the spot got patched out of normal generation years earlier.
Turns out the huge cast of grunting, roaring, sniffing mobs you hear wandering around your world mostly comes down to one person. Mojang's audio director Samuel Aberg does the villagers, the sniffers, the piglins and plenty more himself, layering and pitching his own voice to get that range of sounds, with only a few effects (like the arrow thud, which is actually a rattling chair) coming from elsewhere.
Reporters Without Borders realised that in countries where the free press gets blocked, Minecraft servers often still slip through the firewall. So they built The Uncensored Library, a genuinely massive structure made from over 12.5 million blocks, packed with banned articles and books from places like Russia, Egypt and Belarus, giving young people a sneaky way to read what their governments don't want them to see.
NASA has actually partnered with Minecraft Education on more than one occasion, first getting kids to plan and launch rockets in an Artemis-themed set of worlds, then building out interactive modules based on real James Webb Space Telescope imagery so students can piece together star formation and galaxy types for themselves. It's one of the more surprising ways a block-building game has ended up doubling as a genuine STEM classroom tool.
