hello everyone I have to be honest about something if you want the most comprehensive history of Minecraft there is then this is not the video you're looking for instead I want to make this video of a more personal goal that being compile as much interesting stuff about Minecraft's early development that I didn't know about and put it in a video so here are my findings the first ever version of Minecraft was created in May of 2009 therefore the logical place to start this video is 6 years before that point when talking about Minecraft's history it is inevitable that the discussion will lead to notch as he was the only person working on the game before the end of 2010 but what you need to understand about notch is that before he became a controversial billionaire he was just an ordinary guy who developed video games in his spare time lots of games he made so many games that there's this Notch dictionary on the internet archiving every single game he's ever made despite the large number of games recorded on the intra Clinic only three are of importance to this video the first one is a small MMO RPG Notch made along with Rolf Jansen called worm online the best way to describe worm online is that it was literally Minecraft if it was made in 2006 oh don't believe me here let me show you what the worm online trailer looks like have you ever wondered searched endlessly for a game that lets you live free in a world where you can do and achieve anything well welcome to worm online the game where everything included the houses are built by other players all these walls you see on screen were placed by another player this stable Fountain and roads were all put down by a regular player just like you a quote from worm's former website says when the game is first launched it will be pretty much just only a huge forest and it will be up to the players to build the town and create the items needed for both Everyday Use and more exotic practices now you may be wondering how do I get the resources to build all this stuff well it's actually quite simple first you find the cave and then go mine some precious iron ore for crafting or if you're feeling ambitious you can go dig a cave of your own although that will take a lot longer the important part about worm is that Minecraft wasn't not's first experience making a survival Sandbox game programmed in Java nor was it his first multiplayer game that had an active player base he's been through this cycle before with worm's development even if it was with another person although worm had some clunky U and other small issues it was clear that given the opportunity Notch would be able to pull a game like this off well kind of on April 12th 2007 Notch stopped working on worm online to pursue other projects his main take away from worm was that photo realism is hard work and probably not worth it which is likely why this next game doesn't care about its looks enter breaking the tower you may be wondering what this random game Jam game Notch made in 2 days has to do with Minecraft the answer is absolutely nothing but I'm talking about it anyway because I thought it was fun in Breaking the tower you chop down trees and plant them to get more wood you mine boulders to get rocks you can build more houses including Farms that let you grow wheat the goal of the game is a little ambiguous though as you have to break the giant tower on the other side of the island the reason I want to talk about this game so much is not because of what it does well but because of what it fails at in Breaking the tower you don't actually control the miniature Steves walking around the place in fact you have absolutely no control over them because they have their own free will if you want to build a loging Hut you have to hope your Steves decide to erect the structure instead of aimlessly wandering around and getting stuck on a rock you literally cannot force them to build the building because of this breaking the tower turns into an idol game where the best strategy is to go AFK if you don't you'll be sitting there bored waiting for your people to finally start constructing that building you place 10 minutes ago sure it was fun to impose myself on this world and slowly grow a self-sustaining City that defeats the bad guys but after a while it became apparent that I wasn't really doing anything at all I was always waiting for my literal peons to do everything for me so in a way it was like watching other people play a game for me instead of me doing anything myself in a later interview Notch states that he really likes the top- down game dwar Fortress however he also thought it was too complicated for the average person to get into well it started out I was playing dwar Fortress and losing and I thought the the interface was so complicated but there really some kind of interesting gameplay in it because he found Dwarf Fortress too difficult Notch began making a more accessible version called Ruby Don Ruby Don sounds like it was going to be similar to Breaking the tower in game playay with a heavy focus on a bunch of minions who do everything for you everything about Ruby done including the Cobblestone and grass textures looks like the Minecraft we got but with the key difference that you don't directly do anything yourself the reason I think this is because Notch explicitly mentions minions in a later blog post commenting on how he wanted to add a firsters mode that would let you follow your minions around in real time although this idea never worked out as the Ruby done Graphics became very blurry when the camera was zoomed into first person and so that's probably what Notch was going to make a top- down Dwarf Fortress clone that may have succumbed to the same problems as breaking the tower or at least that's what could have happened if he didn't discover our final game from this chapter infinim franchise this is where we need to introduce a new person Zach Bart nowadays Zach is known for making some of the more creative puzzle games out there having an entire game genre named after him but back in 2001 Zach had a much more modest goal that was creating the greatest game ever how did he plan on making such a thing it's very simple according to the Zack likee game design history book Zach wanted to create a strategy game where all the armies weapons and rules of the game were made up as you played along this he would call infiniton all of these factors would evolve over the course of an infiniton game until one player eventually defeated the other in battle he then and I'm not making this up had a psychotic dream which told him how to improve his game it came to me in a vision of sorts laying down for a appp and teain between Consciousness and sleep the game inspired by the voices in his head became infin Arena which players didn't really like however sack did not give up and then in 2007 he got a small team to make infin frag a firstperson shooter that followed the same principles as infiniton however this time only one of the players was in charge of creating the weapons and player classes while everyone else did The Killing part this player was called the commander and they had control over pretty much every aspect of the game including the building part one thing Zach wanted to add was some way for the commander to build an arena for the other players to fight in except he had absolutely no idea how to do this in a 3D environment listing it as the one problem he couldn't solve that was until his friend Keith taught of a revolutionary idea what if instead of placing tiles on a 2d grid blocks could be placed by looking at the face you want them to be attached to he described it as almost shooting a block down Zack lader made a sequel to infinite frag with his friend Dan hadway it was essentially the same game as the last one only this time the map was procedurally generated for you each world had many different biomes including forests mountains swamps and of course although unfortunately after a year of working on it infinite frak 2 never ended up being finished as the scope of the project became too big however on page 37 sack noted that his favorite part of infinite frak 2 was the caves that's why when he Revisited the block game genre he built a world that was nothing but caves inspired by The Flash game motherload Team Fortress 2 and infin frag came infin minor for the longest time I thought infinim Miner was a firsters shooter based on the screenshot thought people always showed I mean how could I not think that all the characters hold this weird gun looking thing so obviously there's combat right but after playing it for myself I was shocked to learn that you can't actually shoot people nor is there any way to directly attack the enemy besides maybe trying to dig them into lava in actuality the goal of infin Miner is to go underground dig up resources like gold and diamonds before bringing them to the surface to collect money whichever team reaches $10,000 first wins you can also find the more common iron ore underground although this doesn't give you any points iron is instead used to craft various block types including a force field that only your team can pass it can also be used to craft tnt which is very helpful as this lets you walk up to people and instantly kill them hey byebye it is genuinely more fun to PVP people with TNT and to go mining like you're supposed to why but who cares if I wasn't playing the game correctly because to be honest most infin Miner players definitely were not playing the game correctly while Zach and the other developers saw infin Miner as this competitive firstperson mining game The Players saw it as a tool to express their creative freedom if you look up any footage of infin Miner on YouTube most videos of the game are people messing about and building stuff almost none of it shows people playing the game the way it was intended one player built a parkour jump course using infinite Minor's bounce pads another made this lava run mini game where you escaped the perpetually expanding pit of lava someone even built an entire mansion with his friends it's surprising how much you can build with just two colors this strange phenomenon was even reflected in my own test server where one player was more focused on building a parkour course while the rest of the server only cared about Bob each other to death the point is infin Miner gained a small community but almost none of the people in that Community cared about playing the actual game it got so bad that Zack eventually added a sandbox mode to give the people the creative freedom they wanted however the player base wanted more than just a sandbox mode and soon not even the fabric of infinite Miner was safe as the source code got leaked allowing anyone to do whatever they wanted with the game but wasn't that what Zach had wanted his dream of creating a game where the player decides what they want to do was finally a reality yet there was a catch for giving players complete control came at the expense of his own and now Zach was no longer the creator of the very game he created Notch was there to witness all of this happen infin Miner's unique way of building blocks inspired Notch to take Ruby dun's development in a completely different direction my God I realized that that was the game I wanted to do I played it in multiplayer for a while and had a blast but I found it flawed building was fun but there wasn't enough variation and the big red and blue blocks were pretty horrible I thought a fantasy game in that style would work really really well so I tried to implement a simple firstperson engine in that style reusing some of the art and code from Ruby D and came up with this [Music] it would be really easy to say that Notch just copy pasted infin Miner code and made his own game but I don't think it's that simple you have to remember Notch had already made a mining crafting type game before and if you look at Ruby D it was clear he had intended to make a world out of cubes before ever discovering infin Miner on top of that while Ruby dun's code is visible in the original cave game Prototype infin Miner's code is nowhere to be found but then what did he take from infin Miner if it wasn't the code in a block post from 2009 Notch reveals that infin Miner inspired him to make blocky designs and the terrain deforming apart from that everything else was his own Vision with a little bit of Dwarf Fortress sprinkled in here are the game modes Notch was planning to add differentiate his game from infin minor creative mode would be for those players who cared more about building and playing the actual game survival mode would be the main focus in which you survive for as long as possible farming for food and cutting down trees for wood survival mode would even let you play with friends as multiplayer was something Notch Had wanted from the beginning then there was Fortress mode after having built a level in Creative or survival mode you and your friends connect to another Fortress made by other people the map gets bigger so fitb maps and you play a game on this map perhaps capture the flag perhaps something else the last thing left to talk about is his new game's art style nowadays people find Minecraft early art to be nostalgic a little too nostalgic if you ask me like what new kids will never experience seriously but if you looked at it back in 2009 you probably thought the game looked low quality as it turns out this was intentional due to his previous experience in worm online Notch wanted to keep the texture was looking like programmer art in his mind as long as they were clean the blockiness and low resolution would let the imagination do the rest this logic also applied to his game philosophy Notch had already made a highly complicated survival crafting game with many different stats to look out for this time he would create a much more simple game where the only bar that mattered was your health bar it may also have been because he was lazy the grass and Cobblestone textures were stolen from Ruby other textures were taken from his unfinished Dungeon Crawler and the human mob which litters cave game was directly ripped from another one of his early games that never ended up finished essentially all the textures you likely associate with Minecraft were never actually created for Minecraft but anyways it's time we finally talk about the first ever version cave game most people know this as the first real post about Minecraft on the internet but do you know why Notch uploaded this video sometime in the afternoon Notch required help with his cave game Prototype trying to replicate the style of generation he saw in infin Miner so he began talking through Internet relay chat or IRC with other developers the second person who responded to his question went by Riven and Riven would spend the next 6 hours of that day helping Notch develop cave game in the middle of which Notch uploaded cave game Tech test to show Riven his progress but that's not the end of it these two continued having conversations about programming stuff for the next few days which leads to this interaction while Riven is testing cave game in a browser crashed again in Opera yeah okay topnotch I should ask for an hourly rate for this I could get rich if only he knew after the first video of cave game was uploaded to the internet Notch needed a name and what better way to name your new game than to ask random stream strangers for help what I find really funny about this is how little people knew about Notch's game everything they knew came from a single screenshot he posted and a vague description that it was something like infin Miner and the war Fortress but besides that they knew nothing this was far before the first playable build was available so they had to not only guess what the game was about but also name it yet despite their utter ignorance numerous users joined in throwing their suggestion into the mix lunar mon squas infinite dwarf sense Miner Over Matter cave Walker Muff Diver cave command cave craft cave World build order cave Builder s cave world of cave craft the Dig final Cave legend of cave cave Warrior escape from the surface dig Builder order of the stone cave craft order of the stone craft Miner and then Minecraft order of the stone Minecraft seems mostly free 6,000 hits the first is some consulting firm Minecraft Consulting I really like that name Minecraft order of the stone it is so who do I credit for the name now that he had a name for his game along with a basic build Notch decided it was the perfect time to not show it to anyone at least not yet in Notch's mind getting a million crash bugs is both hard on the soul and bad for the game's reputation so before he showed Minecraft to the world he wanted to improve it and make sure he had a version that captured the basic essence of his vision sure he would occasionally ask users over IRC to test his game but a public version of Minecraft wouldn't be available until 4 days later Notch created a logo and posted what is now known as the classic version of Minecraft people immediately fell in love it was an instant hit the same energy that made people creative in infin minor was being used to its full potential everyone quickly began building Mario Bridges castles prisons entire cities and spiral staircases and it is this amazing version that is lost to time d that's right the first publicly available version of Minecraft is also lost media none of that matters right now though because more importantly Notch was about to meet someone who would change his game Forever on the same day that Minecraft's first version was released to the public C418 would find the game and like everyone else he really liked Minecraft he also made music but he thought it sucked and therefore didn't want to show it to anyone C418 would openly speak about how much he hat hated his music despite the chat support C418 I need your music but it is insane yeah well music C418 I want to hear your music c41 18. bandcamp.com he makes awesome music a few minutes later is it possible to buy physical CDs of this C418 sorry you can just download the fl's from band camp which makes me happy anyway this was about as far as the convers ation went until the next day when Notch revealed that He makes music as well I make music too if anyone wants to hear what kind Notch many types of Electronica holy [ __ ] how many albums do you have five and many unsorted I don't like electronic music which is a bit of a problem when trying to listen to your stuff I like C418 music because it's not like electronic music yes it was brilliant stuff actually Notch why haven't you been including music in your games this is something I've been idly wondering for a while because it doesn't fit Minecraft I'd say because I don't like to mix the two strangely games for me is about doing something the player will enjoy making music is me trying to invoke a mood usually I wonder what kind of music would fit Minecraft don't make another amen song I didn't enjoy it on infin miner and so after a that Minecraft doesn't need music because it wouldn't fit Notch hire C4 18 to make Minecraft's music the next day yeah I have no idea interestingly Notch gave c48 total freedom to do whatever he wanted calling him a proper artist because of his creative freedom c48 deliberately created music that went against what people expected by the way you know what other important figure happened to be here as well chb the man who currently works as the lead designer of Minecraft just so happened to be in the chat room while this was all happening or at least that's my theory Jeb didn't start working for mojan until the end of 2010 so it's possible that this is just some similarly named individual so unfortunately unless Jeb randomly confirms that he was uh when I when I played it those first weeks those first weeks played it those first weeks oh okay although unlike C418 Jeb wouldn't be hired until much later so let's return to notch with the music now settled he would spend the next few days adding features fixing bugs and most importantly preparing for multiplayer the first multiplayer test was hosted on May 31st the day after Notch's 30th birthday there's two videos archiving this event and it's funny watching people try to build together while some players built houses and circular Towers others got a bit confused and started aimlessly stacking blocks at spawn regardless the test was was mostly a success in just 18 days Minecraft had gotten 1,800 confirmed users as well as an almost working multiplayer build the game was so exciting that one person installed an IRC client just to play Minecraft it would seem that Notch was Unstoppable then his power went out the entire power grid in his Stockholm suburb died causing the test server to suddenly close without explanation for 2 days after this incident Notch was nowhere to be found causing two players to think he gave up on the game well you could always read his Tumblr Po and find out why he's missing but that's boring imagine you are playing on the first ever multiplayer Minecraft world and then the server randomly closes and the Creator vanishes what are you supposed to do with that information did he just give up on the game or did Zach kidnap him in reality something worse had happened Notch got a 9 to5 he makes a post saying that he can't work on Minecraft at all this week which means the next multiplayer test wasn't until the next day although multiplayer was still unplayable not only did the server not load for some but the players that did get in weren't having a great time either if you didn't struggle with a 5-second delay on placing blocks you were getting your house griefed and destroyed I did not expect the first ever Minecraft servers to have Griefers in them I always believed trolls were this malevolent Force who only appeared in game communities after they became popular but as it turns out the moment you give players the ability to destroy they will use it there was no TNT in this version of Minecraft anyone who wanted to obliterate your house had to spend their time manually breaking every block until there was nothing left yet the boring nature didn't stop anyone griefing was such a common occurrence that measures to stop it quickly became the most requested feature this was partly because Minecraft was a Griefers Haven at this stage name tags weren't added yet so there was no way to tell which one of the 24 identical looking Steves was the one who manually destroyed your house on top of that there was a glitch where some players would turn invisible upon joining the server allowing players to grief people's homes without being seen when you built something on Notch's multiplayer test server it wasn't a question of if griefers would destroy your build it was when even so most people didn't seem to care they were so enticed by just the multiplayer play tests that Minecraft gained an extra 800 users in just 5 days originally Notch wanted to stop at three play tests but due to continual demands from the player base he did two more to satiate their desires for multiplayer it got so bad that at one point people would sit in the Minecraft IRC chat rooms desperately waiting to see if Notch comes online so he could host the multiplayer only to have the 32 player server fill up instantly just think think about how needy you have to be to say something like this Notch you said 2 to 3 hours and it's almost already 3 hours just noticing eventually on June 8th multiplayer was officially added allowing anone with the techical knoow to host the Minecraft server in other words the floodgates were opened literally I didn't mention it before but there was a much more Insidious way to grief in Notch's multiplayer test and it is downright evil liquids in Minecraft at this stage did not have proper flow code instead water would spread infinitely to other blocks perfectly fill in any container you might put it in it's a low effort way to make liquid spread to other blocks and while it can easily get out of control the worst thing that could happen is you accidentally flood a cave or something but in multiplayer it was a different story despite Notch's efforts Minecraft was a very easy game to hack and it was not uncommon to see players giving themselves speed and fly cheats apparently if you were techsavvy enough you could even give yourself admin permissions on random servers you just joined however if you wanted to make sure an entire server was completely unplayable all you had to do was summon a single block of lava at the top of the map and wait it is frustrating watching this footage all the hours of hard work put into the server will soon be buried under the ever expanded in lava and there's nothing anyone can do to stop that it's not a particularly fast way of griefing most computers couldn't handle such a large mass of lava constantly spreading in every direction so it took a while before any damage could be done but inevitably the whole world would be taken over by lava a fatal disaster from one block I'm just here to apologize I'm probably the first one who hacked the game memory hack to Lava flood and stuff don't worry about it I appreciate it though I didn't really like to do lava flood but believe me or not everyone was asking for it sponges were later added as a griefing countermeasure although they only stopped water and not lava once again though despite the problems multiplayer may have faced people really loved it even with only a basic inventory of blocks Minecraft had reached 4,200 registered users a day after multiplayer released and a day after that Notch decided to announce his plan for monetization the full game will be 2020 but if you pre- purchase wells in Alpha you get it for just 9.95 now you may be thinking that this sounds pretty reasonable you get the full version of Minecraft plus any future updates and you get to do whatever you want with it that sounds like a good deal right WR or at least that's what part of the community taught with some vocal players disapproving of the decision to start pre-orders for what was essentially a glorified Tech demo riddled with hackers kind of a [ __ ] move to copy somebody's concept from their free game and then charge for it others thought Minecraft was too expensive for what it offered I mean think of it like this Plants versus Zombies a professional casual game is only 10 it's worth noting that these complaints came from a vocal minority as there was a significant portion of players willing to pre-order Minecraft in its pre-alpha state when there was barely anything added by June 14 Minecraft had almost reached 10,000 registered users with 200 of those players pre-ordering the game by the end of June Minecraft had skyrocketed to around 20,000 users and over 500 pre-orders at one point Notch stated that he was now making more money off of Minecraft than he was from his actual job not wanting to waste the opportunity to capitalize on his new found success Notch spent the entirety of July doing absolutely nothing 90 no really after two extremely productive months Notch spends 9 days being sick and then decides he would rather take some time off before resuming Minecraft's development in August yet due to the nature of the game he created this wasn't much of a problem in Notch's absence the community began creating their own update for the game one such user went by the name of jte who had created her own custom server which drastically improved the multiplayer experience along with some griefing and hacking protection jte server had a custom name name tags growable trees and stationary water all in all jte was considered a programming God by the small Minecraft community and that idea terrified Notch he knew very well how easy it was to lose control over a project like this so he made a small remediation to his previous you can do anything with the game after you buy it statement do not distribute anything I've made or modified versions of anything I've made I want all clients and server downloads to come from minecraft.net I don't wish to lose control of this project and definitely not before it's finished essentially you were still allowed to mod Minecraft as long as modding Minecraft didn't involve Distributing your mods to other players when he later learned about JT's custom server Notch joined it and flooded the place with lava as a test interestingly Notch actually had no problems with what jte was doing as long as she didn't distribute the modded code because of this in the same conversation jte asked to work on Minecraft with Notch to which he replied no I'm doing a solo project still not the third when Notch took a break from development in July JT would take on her biggest project yet spff spliff as a miname had existed before this point but it had major problems notably it was very easy to cheat either by destroying in the walls of the arena or by placing blocks you weren't supposed to you also had to reset the floor every time you played spliff which meant you were spending more time in maintenance than actually playing the game GTE solved all of these problems with a downloadable server that only plays spliff tries to detect hacks and nothing else it also resets the map after every round removing the need to manually rebuild the floor unlike her previous Creations this sple version was downloadable from the forums allowing anyone and everyone to play sple provided they knew how to run a server this was a lot of fun for the community but it directly broke Notch's one rule of not Distributing modded copies of the game although it is unknown how he responded to this or if he even knew about JT's belief at all what is known is how the for moderators responded to this thread with hostility a moderator threatened to ban jte off the forums if she continued making mods like this believing Min games like spliff were stealing money from Notch and so jte left the Minecraft Community never creating any other planned mini game like zombie tag what's stupid about this situation is that mods and mini games are a staple part of Minecraft today yet back then creating one was a bannable offense which means that two moderators effectively set back the community by a few months by bullying a promising modder off the forums all because they wanted to protect Notch who keep in mind B barely had a clue what was going on it's just such a shame those new kids will never experience this loving Community Minecraft Classics creative mode while fun wasn't anything more than a very basic sandbox it was a game only as interesting as the player made it and if you weren't creative then there was no game the vision of this Dwarf Fortress inspired fantasy world had yet to be conceived so in that sense Minecraft the game would only really start developing in this next version the first survival test build looks nothing like what survival mode would end up as there's no crafting you don't even have an inventory all you can do is break blocks with your Ultra powerful Stone breaking fists and punch monsters to death for points eventually you die and see how many points you collected that's it that's the game this is the game Notch wanted to develop oh wait no hold on Notch just made a new block post let's see what this is about announcing the Dungeons and lever's expansion back dungeon mode expansion back why is he announcing a DLC before survival mode is done the game's not even done yet why are you announcing an expansion pack actually now would be a good time to bring up something I've been neglecting and that is Notch's tendency to promise something will come into MyCraft and then never deliver on it we've already seen Notch talk about Fortress mode and now whatever ever the hell the Dungeons and levers expansion is but Notch saying he will add something and then proceeding to never add it is surprisingly common to entice people to pre-order Minecraft notch said he would add a Zombie Siege mode capture the flag and a doom level importer none of these things ever got close to being added when writing down his vision for survival mode a large amount of his ideas never made it to the final game this includes goblins trolls steel and once again capture the flag mode the reason this kept happening is because Notch did not have a design document for Minecraft he was making it up as he went along which isn't necessarily a bad thing but it makes it impossible to tell what his intentions are it doesn't help that sometimes he just lies to players the existence of the real maybe list implies Notch lies about liking bad suggestions which might make him sound kind but makes it difficult to tell if Notch actually lik someone's idea or if he's just saying he does to make them feel good torches that eventually ran out of light was one of these fickle ideas he made up on the spot and then never did anything with it but perhaps the worst example of this comes from an old Q&A a player by the name of tev emailed Notch asking him questions about his ideas behind survival mode when asked about a potential hunger bar Notch was against the idea as it didn't align with one of his core goals food will only be needed to regain Health the there is no food bar an example of something I'll probably not add is poison there is no real way to show that other than to use an icon and even that is hard to understand and there's no way to know how to stop being poisoned obviously both hunger and poison are in the game right now as they were added just before Minecraft's release so even the things he promised not to add can't be trusted as you never know when he'll do a complete 180 with his game design philosophy at one point he even said he would add a realistic mode what the hell is a realistic mode that sounds like a clickbait Minecraft mod you'd find on YouTube not an actual feature what are you trying to add well anyway remember Riven the guy who gave Notch advice on how to develop cave game yeah now he's outright giving Notch better networking code to make Minecraft less easy to hack I bring Riven up again because despite Notch being a solo developer on the surface he was still getting help from other sources whether that was C418 for the music music Paul Lamb's engine for sound programming help from various forums or by taking inspiration from Community ideas like when a snow texture pack later inspired Notch to officially add snow to the game and although Notch told jte earlier that he wanted to be a solo developer he wasn't opposed to let any more people work on the game in the email interview from before he states that should someone impress him the same way C418 did he would be willing to hire them and soon Notch would meet that person only instead of making music he made art on November 20th Notch asks any low-resolution pixel artists to email him if they are interested in working on Minecraft and much like C418 the person he would end up hiring had played Minecraft since the very beginning that person's name was Hayden Scott Baron or doc as I'll call him from now on on December 22nd Notch reveals the new art style for Minecraft this is how the logo will look and this is how the main character will look and people hate had mixed opinions on it some simply weren't a fan of the new art style While others were entirely on board with it not seeing a problem however even if only a minority of players hated the new style the hate from that small group was so strong that it became toxic part of it was genuine concerns over it becoming harder to create custom skins for a model as complex as this but most of it was unwarranted anger caused by a fatal misunderstanding despite the growing hate against the new style Notch continued tinkering around with the new md3 models in order to test them doc sent Notch a model he had of his original character RA in block form Ra was a character he had previously used in his art books among other things so when he got hired for Minecraft it just made sense to use her again as a test model however the community saw a different story if you pre-ordered Minecraft you would gain access to every little build Notch worked on this included the ra build which had temporarily replaced the character model because of this players got the impression that R was the new player model and that on top of drastically changing Minecraft's iconic style doc was now trying to turn the protagonist into a frog girl even worse some players found some of Doc's older artwork and concluded that if they didn't do anything Minecraft was going to look like this players were already not happy and now the the game had given them a Target to direct their anger towards the evil frog girl was trying to destroy Minecraft and she had to be stopped and so the displeased Community started a petition voicing their concerns I don't like anime pretty much and I would hate to have Minecraft like it leave it blocky they scare me and I'll look like girls the new models are too rounded seriously those things just scare me it doesn't fit with the blocky pixel team this is really going to turn off Manny fans and start bringing those annoying anime obsessed teenagers who turn Minecraft into a Mee invested [ __ ] hole don't bring cute anime characters in the game it just doesn't fit I think the current models are fine if it ain't broke don't fix it we want old player models please keep the style of Minecraft Minecraft is blocky and blocky is good I'm not fond of seeing relatively round models invade the blocky world that makes Minecraft I hate how people are looking looking for more realism when we're playing Super Mario Bros the building set there was so many threads against the ra player model that they began getting banned off of the forms though the hate wasn't as universal as I'm making it seem as most players were either indifferent about the art style or directly supported Doc in his involvement with Minecraft but even if the toxicity came from a small audience that audience still existed and wanted doc gone it didn't help that Notch was starting to be disillusioned about Doc's new style Notch aren't you getting pissed at these [ __ ] whining about doc I think it's really irritating no can't say I am I can understand why people don't want large changes in style some people are being a bit obnoxious about it though most present very rational and clear opinions and reasons why they dislike it so what will you do Notch keep the old style or go with the new one I'm going with the new one but I'm going to ask him to turn down the cute a bit and I will in insist on pixelated textures that you can customize after promising he would go with the new one doc left Minecraft due to some animation issues with the game I wouldn't want to imply Doc's leing had anything to do with the previous incident as I have no evidence for this but I can't imagine he was too sad about leaving a player base that was this averse to change regardless the survival test had been tested and now Notch was once again the famed solo developer of Minecraft meaning it was finally time to craft the crafting part endev technically all the ra stuff was considered inep but that makes this video flow better so mining was a relatively easy mechanic to add as Minecraft previously already contained coal iron and gold unlike mining crafting was a little more complicated as it looked completely unrecognizable at first but very quickly that to functioned exactly the way it does in modern Minecraft in order to reinforce this gameplay Loop Notch reason that it would be a good idea to add an XP bar when you start a new game or join a server you're at level one you start with four hearts of Health kill monsters to gain XP gain enough XP and you gain a level every time you level up you gain half a heart up to the maximum and you also mine extremely slightly faster leveling up would be pretty fast and here's the kicker when you die regardless of reason you go back to level one and you drop all the items you are carrying everyone in the community was taken aack by this stroke of Genius as this XP idea was just so bad people complained so much that in the same day Notch went back on this idea and promised that he wouldn't try adding XP to the game weirdly XP and levels are a fundamental part of Minecraft in the modern versions which suggests that Notch actually stunted Minecraft's development by by listening to the knee-jerk reaction of his community if the community was only more accepting of Notch's ideas they would have gotten levels much earlier in development regardless it looked like Minecraft was close to being released the only major bit not added was survival multiplayer and of course the levers and dungeons expansion which Notch still promised was for sure coming on his public to-do list but for the most part Minecraft was well in its way to being complete or at least that's what might have happened if Notch didn't have an epiphany that would completely change the course of his game forever it's the morning of February 21st and Notch made a new blog post I have a potentially gamebreaking idea do not do infinitely large Maps when you start the game only the area nearest to the player is generated when you move closer to the edge of this area more map is generated and the areas you move away from get Sav to the dis advantages you you will never run out of space you will never run out of resources you can travel between several planes of existence so hell could be a real plane you could visit and the Moon too possibly this sounds like a great idea and yet people were skeptical this is super interesting to me infinite worlds are such a foundational part of Minecraft that you probably don't even think about them the world constantly making more and more terrain is just how the game is supposed to be but back in 2010 infinite World sounded like a terrible idea and shockingly players actually gave good arguments as to why even though infinite worlds were definitely the right choice in retrospect back then it wasn't so obvious the detractors had four main points that were most frequently repeated on the forums number one isolation finding players in an infinitely large world is painful as even today some people will join your world and base like 10,000 blocks away from everyone else making their house impossible to find this makes the entire concept of multiplayer redundant what is the point of playing with other people if you never see them number two infinite Supply no demand you don't have to think about what you're crafting if you never run out of resources as you can always go generate some new chunks and wow suddenly you have more iron there's no reason to conserve a resource that you have an infinite amount of in multiplayer this means there will be no competition for resources to quote a player from the forums you'll never have to say that guy has something I need I'll kill him and take it number three griefing if you thought griefing was easy before now all you have to do to destroy someone's server is walk because generating new chunks makes the world file bigger if you keep walking in a given Direction you could in Crash someone's Minecraft server by making the world too big at the very least it sounded like this could slow the game down to a crawl moderation was another problem how can someone moderate a map if the map is infinite you won't be able to see the entire map from one Vantage Point like you could before making griefing much more difficult to detect and finally but most importantly adding infinite World sounds like a lot of work and I can't be bothered to wait for Notch to finish that normally I like to make fun of people who are comically allergic to change especially when it comes in the form of a forum post for a video game that's still in Alpha but this is different Notch himself admitted that adding infinite worlds would require a major rewrite and therefore was a drastic shift in Direction this wasn't a regular old update it was a risk one that could potentially kill Minecraft if Notch wasn't careful it's such a fascinating scenario to look back on because from a modern perspective of course adding infinite worlds was a good idea Minecraft would not be Minecraft if the world ended with a brick wall some 200 blocks in yet in 2010 the arguments made logical sense how are people supposed to find each other when everyone bases thousands of block walks away how can the Game Force players to make interesting decisions in a survival game when there's literally infinite resources at play the future will always seem Bleak when taken from a logical point of view but what these players lacked is the perspective that we have now how could they logically conclude anything about a future update they had yet to play being able to play the update doesn't necessarily obliterate all of these arguments but it does reveal a lot of nuance you can't get by just thinking about it oh and of course there was the one guy asking to make infinite worlds a setting I even found a rare shiny breed of the make it a setting guy asking to make it an expansion just like the levers and dungeons one which I'm sure is going to come out any second now but the scariest part about infinite worlds to me at least is Notch's original idea of making them infinitely deep maybe if the concept of big tange doesn't scare you then this won't make sense but the idea of a Minecraft world that just keeps going down and down with no end is absolutely terrifying like what happens if someone sets the world spawn point 20,000 blocks beneath the surface are you just trapped down there do you have any hope of making it to the surface or are you just going to live in a cave if the world was infinitely deep you could theoretically keep digging and digging and digging without ever reaching the bottom but then again that might be for the better maybe I don't want to know what hides at the bottom of a Minecraft world did Minecraft just make me right a creepy after Notch was convinced of the infinite World idea he was shocked to learn how quickly it worked with this knowledge in mind not changed his goal Minecraft was no longer a quick 6 to 10 month plan as the scope increased dramatically but don't you worry he will still eventually finish the levers and dungeons expansion which will come shortly after the release of After Infinite worlds were added Minecraft would keep growing until Notch quit his job to work on it fulltime as a result he began doing what what we called secret Friday updates the Friday updates serve two purposes for one they let me let off some steam and just do what I think is the most fun with game development adding radical new features and secondly they were great as a regular weekly T to keep the game feeling fresh while C418 was busy adding new music to the game Notch would update Minecraft every Friday with some small new features like rails Minecarts doors or even a hidden winter mode the catch was Notch didn't tell you what was added during Friday that was up to you to figure out for yourself well some data Min the code and spoiled the surprise for everyone else there were many others who tried to figure out the new features organically this added a layer of mystery to Minecraft that wasn't present before as you couldn't know if the new update added something simple like boats or a rare monster that spawns deep underground it is around this same time that players inexplicably began finding the game a little creepy while Minecraft was not at all a horror game it wasn't unheard of to feel a little scared while playing alone the large influx of new players who knew nothing about Minecraft coupled with secret updates that couldn't te add anything only escalated this feeling that there was something wrong with the game you were playing take for example this blog post Notch made on June 25th on this secret Friday you might want to go splunking on newly generated levels or previously unexplored Terrain in the very next post he comments on a recent bug with the mysterious new addition stating I gave them the same entity ID as the secret update stuff in the caves what the hell is a secret update stuff in the caves is there a new monster down [Music] there oh never mind it's just dungeons somewhat unexpectedly the scariest update did not happen on Friday it was on Thursday July 7th where C418 added some new sounds to the game sounds that Notch describes as awesome what he doesn't mention is that these sounds are the terrifying cave Noises by this stage secret Friday updates were getting data mined almost immediately within 20 minutes some guy will have posted everything new with the update in the comments of Notch's blog however when the update candidly talked about what was added no one cared to investigate deeper compared to an unspecified mystery Edition new sounds just weren't as interesting this one factor made the inevitable discovery of cave sounds much more surprising as players couldn't identify what was causing them and I don't blame them because half of these noises do not sound like a cave at all has anyone heard the roar yet I heard a wolf house before there was nothing in Minecraft that was supposed to be scary if anything was it was all in your imagination but now the game confirmed your superstitions that something else was out there and very soon that something would be discovered while this was all happening Minecraft was receiving a ton of New Eyes by July 17th it had amassed 30,000 sales a number that would explode when on July 28th the Team Fortress 2 blog of all places encouraged people to play craft because according to the blog post valve employees were too busy playing it to work on Team Fortress 2 this one post caused a, new players to buy the game overnight with this huge influx of new players C418 decided it was the perfect time to scare them July 30th was a secret Friday and it added two music discs one of those discs was the spooky track called 13 according to his website C418 origin wanted 13 to randomly play when you're underground similar to Cave sounds which is just about the most evil idea he has ever come up with imagine randomly hearing this when you're [Music] underground upon further investigation the player would find that the music is actually coming from somewhere somewhere in the same cave they are currently mining in if the player continued exploring that cave they would eventually find disc 13 ominously playing from a jukebox that's how you were originally supposed to find music discs randomly playing underground I am so disappointed they never added this to the game instead dis 13 would be found inside dungeon chests but that didn't make the music any less creepy for dis 13 is the first item to add any form of story to Minecraft while everything else was randomly generated lacking any developer input this music came with purpose it came with the specific implication that someone else was here before you as heard by the random splash of water in the middle of the song followed by what sound like [Music] footsteps and while in game there was no other entity similar to the player that didn't stop the community from having Mass hysteria over what would eventually turn into Minecraft's first urban legend the day after Friday a video was uploaded to YouTube showing the new 13 track except something was off about this video if you look closely there's two white eyes ominously staring at you from the darkness and while this video was far from being official it was also far from unimportant the next day a creepy pasta by the name of white eyes was posted to the Minecraft forms using the previous video as evidence for the creatures existence this is how the story goes Jesus Christ I can't do it anymore I can't take it anymore I can't go back home I can't go into my mines I can't do anything anymore but slowly tried to build something under the frozen ocean and it's all because of two little pixels despite being a fictional story there was some truth to this due to a graphical glitch that happened around Alpha some players would occasionally see white dots randomly appear in the distance apparently this was because the block in Minecraft are not perfectly side by side which made it possible to see white pixels in the tiny space between blocks if you were unlucky two white dots would appear next to each other taking the form of something watching you in the darkness adding a lot more credibility to the white eyes story it started a couple weeks ago after a secret Friday update some people started reporting seeing a pair of white eyes whenever an underground ambient noise was triggered I figured it was just a bug or something maybe some way he did it to trigger The Sounds themselves I didn't hear much more about it for a while then all of a sudden recently I've been seeing reported sightings everywhere and I suppos it's screenshot of them too by the way there's a really helpful investigation document on white eyes if you want to know more about orange I am ripping out my eyeballs where is the vidio okay I'll hurry up sometime during August the now renowned creepy Pastor image of Herobrine was posted at an unknown date giving a proper name to Minecraft's new urban legend but it wasn't until a certain live stream that Herobrine's popularity really took off the footage you are seeing is this Recreation stream on YouTube by Ender boss 25 on the 30th of August a live streamer by the name of Copland was streaming his seemingly ordinary Minecraft world up until he encounters Herobrine at which point Copan runs out of his house ends the stream and becomes lost media despite the footage being lost the impact the stream had on Herobrine's popularity is not to be understated as after this point the Minecraft forums would get floated by many players all claiming to have seen Herobrine in their world with proof I guess it's herobrine Hawk's day again oh wait that's every day it's crazy how arguably one of the most creative ideas made by the community was triggered by se4 18's decision to increase the horror factor of Minecraft there is an alternate universe somewhere where C418 didn't add cave sounds or dis 13 preventing the butterfly effect that caused Herobrine to be created despite being a Sandbox game with infinite possibilities Herobrine would have never been made if C418 didn't push the community in that direction surprisingly in a later interview Notch regrets not adding Herobrine or something like him to the game stating I think I waited too long to add it it wouldn't be as funny if I added it now if something like that makes it into the G game it should be just a few days after the rumor starts spreading overall to me the most interesting part of the Herobrine Legend is this one section from the four chance story some of the people who had encountered the mystery man looked into the name Herobrine and found that name to be frequently used by a Swedish gamer after some further information gathering it was revealed to be the brother of Notch the games developer I personally emailed Notch and asked him if he had a brother it took a while but he emailed me back with a very short message I did but he is no longer with us it strikes me as strange how even in Minecraft's creepy pastas Notch would be a major character I genuinely cannot think of another video game creepy pasta that just Nam drops the lead developer like this really think about the implications of that there's no reason for Herobrine to be Notch's dead brother yet he is why because although it's hard to remember Notch and Minecraft used to be two Inseparable terms and if you were reading this story that meant you knew who Notch was even after hiring five more people to work at mojan it was still all about notch people worshiped the guy by making temples of his face inside his game because if you knew about Minecraft you knew about Notch and the two would become further connected when a crazy incident received significant attention when Minecraft sold 100,000 copies the website had had so many people trying to buy it that the server crashed preventing anyone from purchasing the game for the next 4 days Notch disabled game sales and let people play Minecraft for free otherwise there would be literally no way to play Minecraft on the website without pirating it as notch was now making hundreds of thousands off of Minecraft PayPal froze his account as it got flagged for suspicious activity before this point if you wanted to buy Minecraft you had to do it over PayPal a rudimentary system that worked when Minecraft was a small game but not when the servers are crashing because of the she this led to his account getting locked trapping a measly €600,000 in there that was completely inaccessible both Minecraft becoming free to play and the story of Na's PayPal account freezing was what caused Minecraft to sell a ridiculous number of copies in a single day at one point a copy of Minecraft was sold every 3 seconds the sheer unexpected popularity of Minecraft brought Notch's name into contention revolving around whether or not he deserved such Universal Acclaim over such a barebones alpha I think most people will agree that Minecraft has attracted an unprecedented amount of attention for an alpha version of a game for some players Minecraft offered very little Beyond being a Sandbox sure there's survival mode but not only is there not much to survive against there isn't even anything to do you can get full diamond gear in a little over an hour and by that point you've practically finished the game the mobs don't get stronger over time nor is there anything to find out there that could give you something to do below where you buy Minecraft not states that he believes all good stories have a conflict where was the conflict where was the survival mode that was more difficult than easy understandably veteran players were getting a bit impatient waiting for Notch to fulfill his promises it was clear he wasn't going to add meaningful new content if he wasn't forced and so on October 20 it a group of hackers decided to Dos minecraft. org as a means of protesting at first Notch wasn't sure if this was an attack or if it was just another Spike of people Mass purchasing the game but pretty soon the hackers revealed themselves and their intentions Minecraft is currently experiencing a stimulation provided by us its purpose is to send Notch a clear message of how the future of Minecraft will turn out unless he gets to work namely by influencing the amount of sales taking place due to to the attacks start providing your customers with the updates that you promised them after Notch learns of the attack he goes to speak with the hackers on forchan and he posts an early texture of the ghast enemy to prove to them that he is still working on making survival mode harder a lot of people don't believe him and assume this is just some troll pretending to be Notch but no this is the real Notch and the same day the attack stops as the hackers were satisfied with his evidence Notch never posted the Gast model on his blog so the rest of the community didn't find out about this until the Minecraft Halloween update enter a scary new realm fight scary new monsters actually difficult this time around experience scarier depths the deeper you are the brighter it has to be to stay safe be afraid of the dark torches will die after a while use flint and steel to reignite or place lanterns that last forever there was a few other small features but overall monsters that are actually difficult scarier depths this sounds exactly like what Minecraft needs to stay inter in except if you know a lot about Minecraft you may have noticed that two of these features were never added to the game torches last forever and lanterns were never added at least while Notch was working on it further more the scarier depths part is a blatant lie the implication here is that monsters spawn more fre quently ly the deeper you are or that the caves closer to bedrock are somehow darker but neither are true outside of that minor Mis advertisement though most people like the Halloween update and the new dimension and biomes it brought so let's move on to Beta on the turn of 2011 Minecraft had almost sold a million copies the speed of purchases only getting faster inversely game development speed only seemed to be getting slower as mojan was now actively trying to a void reaching release date half of Mojang's development time was now spent on random fun stuff instead of finishing survival mode random fun stuff like wolves which a usern named flowerchild absolutely despised wolves were a poorly programmed mechanic that didn't interact with the rest of the game the only reason they were added is because a star struck Notch met his game developer Idol at GDC promising him he would add pets to Minecraft therefore flower child believed they were a waste of development time his hatred was so strong that he made an entire mod dedicated to the idea of what moan could have added if they didn't waste development time on wolves this mod was called better than wolves granted most players disagreed with flowerchild not finding problems with features like wolves as the base game on its own offered them a creatively stimulating experience but for those seeking greater challenges they felt Minecraft was lacking in the adventure department for these types of players features like colored blocks squids lapis lazuli cakes dispensers beds slabs and repeaters didn't feel like they added much they wanted an intrinsically rewarding Adventure not a bunch of building blocks one of the most prominent people with this opinion was David Angel 64 or as most people knew him the guy from X's adventures in Minecraft after getting bored of Minecraft in April X would upload a video linking a post explaining his grievances Sandstone blocks and other building materials like like colored wool do not add anything new to the game they just add a few different types of Legos to the bucket in the classroom as far as adventuring goes well the adventuring in Minecraft has always been very weak from the start X suggested many ways Notch could fix this side of Minecraft in his post and while not everyone liked his exact suggestions Manny did agree with the sentiment that Minecraft needed a greater adventuring aspect so a large number of players began linking X's post to Notch and notch being as receptive to feedback as he is he read the post and reading huge texts with suggestions on how to fix Minecraft really kills my inspiration and motivation however he did agree on one thing Minecraft survival mode does get stale after the first couple of nights and this he had plans to fix before release on June 10th Minecraft had teased something that hadn't been seen since the nether update we are working on Minecraft Beta 1.7 which I'm referring to as the adventure update the idea with this update is to flash out the game a bit making it reward exploration and combat more on July 5th the adventure update got some official artwork as well as the update's major features and this time there would be no broken promises NPC Villages randomly generated dungeons new biome code fully working creative mode Critical Hits sprinting and more farming options compared to the final update this list was far from comprehensive as what we got was far better than what was promised in the initial teasers the entire world got reworked with new biomes to explore and a few new unique structures to find finally giving the player a real incentive to explore their world on top of that several game mechanics were overhauled to make survival more challenging and more rewarding hunger was added creating a constant pressure on the player to get food to survive enchanting was added giving players a method to become stronger even after crafting the strongest tools and then the game had released after the releasee of Minecraft notch would step down from development right after the game released which is shocking because I always thought that happened years later but no turns out Notch ditched Minecraft right after release and gave it to Jeb which means that every single update after the release of Minecraft was made without Notch and honestly despite making the game itself I find it hard to notice his absence Minecraft continued getting updates after release and they stayed thematically similar IL to previous ones arguably adding more adventuring content than Notch ever did and I could go on padding this script out listing everything they added since then for another 2 hours but I think that would be unnecessary as I've learned enough to draw two main conclusions for one pre-release Minecraft really sucks with how old the game is it's easy to misremember the past and believe the beta versions are way better than they actually are but as I hope I've proven by now Minecraft's past is not some magical land of the cool and is instead much more flawed than the modern game furthermore many complaints players have about the game today were also ones players had back then Minecraft has always had Griefers Minecraft has always had bullies Minecraft's player base has always been allergic to change Minecraft survival mode has always been criticized for being easy Minecraft has always added random fun gimmicks that don't interact with the rest of the game Minecraft's audience has always been primarily children who are terrified of a Steve player model with white eyes but that doesn't make Minecraft a bad game it's still really fun especially with all the challenging exploration content Moran has added since 2011 it's definitely only gotten better since release not the other way around another thing I'd like to point out is the amount of times Minecraft's early development was held back because the community didn't like Notch's ideas Early Access can be extremely valuable for Gathering feedback but in this case Notch really should have listened less the amount of times players refuse to accept meaningful new ideas is astounding I think in general people should be more accepting of radical developer ideas especially ones coming from a game's Alpha change is always scary but without change Minecraft would still be played on a small square Island I wonder what those players who are vehemently opposed to infinite worlds think about the game now do they still think Minecraft would be better if the world was 500 by 500 or has the feeling of impending doom left their minds to end the video I'd like to quote something Zack bartro in his infin Miner postmortem I really doubt there will ever be an end all greatest game ever and even if there is you'll still get bored of it part of the fun of playing a game is discovering it and figuring it out in all honesty I'm surprised I didn't figure this out earlier
