Minecraft: The Coolest Game You've Never Heard Of

If you’re still not convinced…

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Here’s a list of many of the cool features already in the game:

Furnace can be crafted from stone, used to smelt metal, cook meat, make glass out of sand
Doors, signs (w/ custom text), ladders, stairs, boats can be crafted from wood/iron
Mine carts and tracks for quicker travel, combine with furnace for powered carts
Trees grow over time and develop branches, saplings can be planted to sprout new trees
Trees and wooden blocks are flammable, fire spreads fast so be careful!
Soil can be tilled, seeds planted to grow wheat, which is made into bread
Water and lava flow dynamically, both can be carried in a bucket and placed wherever
“Redstone” dust can be laid on the ground to act as an electrical circuit, see more info here
Buttons, levers, and other switches can be used to manipulate adjacent objects (open doors, switch cart tracks, etc.)
TNT can be crafted from gunpowder and sand, combine with the aforementioned switches and/or redstone circuits to detonate from afar or even autonomously (land mines!)

I know I’ve left out plenty of things, and new stuff is being added all the time, but you get the idea. Notch has made development of Minecraft his full-time occupation, which is pretty awesome. In the past few weeks, sales of the game have been booming thanks to an interview with PC Gamer, a mention on the Team Fortress 2 blog, and various other media attention. They have peaked at around 1500 copies sold in 24 hours, which comes out to around $20,000. With more than 53,000 purchases thus far, he’s grossed nearly three-quarters of a million bucks! Granted, Paypal and Swedish taxes eat up a good portion of that, but this cat is still making a six-figure salary. As far as I’m concerned, he deserves it.

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Once Minecraft is finished, Notch hopes to get distribution on Steam, and there will be updates “for as long as people enjoy and purchase the game.” After that, he might even release the source code and everything as public domain, due to his dislike of GPL and similar licenses. Click here to learn more about the origins of the game and Notch’s “fun first” philosopy.

If you’ve read this far, I’m betting you’ve seen enough to realize you need to try this game as soon as humanly possible. On top of everything I’ve already talked about, there’s actually been an early version of the Survival multiplayer server released. There are a lot of bugs and many standard features of offline Alpha still need to be implemented, but once that is done, the game will graduate to beta and the price will double, so buy now. You can also click here to try out the Classic mode if you’d like, but I leave you now with an example of a fellow with way too much free time on his hands: