There have been a lot of words spilled about Minecraft and its legacy on video games as a medium. As a result it's hard to give genuinely new observations about the game, so I will simply describe my experiences.
My memory is hazy -- I remember first encountering Minecraft on a friend-of-a-friend's Playstation Portable at around 10 or 11, but the game was never released for that console. (It might have been a phone, or as was the case for me, an iPod Touch.) Either way, I was mesmerized by the ability to build or destroy basically anything in the explorable voxel world. Later I would find Minecraft: Pocket Edition Lite (probably 0.5.x or 0.6.x) and the free browser version of Minecraft Classic (the creative-only browser Java applet version of 0.30), happily playing with my siblings and friends at our church and on whatever Classic multiplayer servers were up. Sometime at age 11, I got the demo, and shortly thereafter the full paid version of the Java Edition, known then simply as Minecraft.
In the coming years I and my siblings would play across dozens, if not hundreds, of survival worlds, each filled with tiny stories. My brother would build elaborate, walled castles of cobblestone in his survival worlds but never fill in the creeper craters scattered around it. I built smaller, minimalistic homes and focused on fancy tunnels and paths connecting points of interest.
Beyond singleplayer worlds, we played thousands of games on multiplayer servers. My sister loved Hunger Games, a community-created multiplayer mode loosely inspired by the Suzanne Collins book series of the same name and a staple of any game-focused server. I and my brother spent hours defending forts in the LihP server network's Dwarves vs. Zombies.
Even to this day, I still watch Minecraft lets-play channels on YouTube (namely Ethoslab) and occasionally participate in private community servers run by my friends, helping to gear up new players and construct elaborate buildings, farms, and transporation networks. Though I no longer follow the game as it updates, I doubt I will ever truiy be done with Minecraft.
My memory is hazy -- I remember first encountering Minecraft on a friend-of-a-friend's Playstation Portable at around 10 or 11, but the game was never released for that console. (It might have been a phone, or as was the case for me, an iPod Touch.) Either way, I was mesmerized by the ability to build or destroy basically anything in the explorable voxel world. Later I would find Minecraft: Pocket Edition Lite (probably 0.5.x or 0.6.x) and the free browser version of Minecraft Classic (the creative-only browser Java applet version of 0.30), happily playing with my siblings and friends at our church and on whatever Classic multiplayer servers were up. Sometime at age 11, I got the demo, and shortly thereafter the full paid version of the Java Edition, known then simply as Minecraft.
In the coming years I and my siblings would play across dozens, if not hundreds, of survival worlds, each filled with tiny stories. My brother would build elaborate, walled castles of cobblestone in his survival worlds but never fill in the creeper craters scattered around it. I built smaller, minimalistic homes and focused on fancy tunnels and paths connecting points of interest.
Beyond singleplayer worlds, we played thousands of games on multiplayer servers. My sister loved Hunger Games, a community-created multiplayer mode loosely inspired by the Suzanne Collins book series of the same name and a staple of any game-focused server. I and my brother spent hours defending forts in the LihP server network's Dwarves vs. Zombies.
Even to this day, I still watch Minecraft lets-play channels on YouTube (namely Ethoslab) and occasionally participate in private community servers run by my friends, helping to gear up new players and construct elaborate buildings, farms, and transporation networks. Though I no longer follow the game as it updates, I doubt I will ever truiy be done with Minecraft.