Minecraft

Let me take you back to the early 90’s. PCs ran DOS and windows 3.1 was what you used to get Word working. 286’s were dead and 486’s were the new king (types of processor 80286 & 80486), no one had heard of a Pentium and graphics cards had 512KB of ram on them. This was the era of 16 bit computing, of Mega Drives and SNES (Sony didn’t bring out the Playstation till 1994/95).

Minecraft is a game that captures that spirit, blocky graphics, midi sound & great game play. Minecraft is a sandbox game where players work in huge levels to create structures, think lego but MUCH bigger. You can work in single or multiplayer servers and the levels are all randomly created.As a games design resource it might not be up there with Kodu or a games development environment like UDK but it does allow kids (and teachers) to work together and build incredible structures. Its a long way off to release but give the free version a shot.

Here are some stats lifted off the site today. It costs 10 euros and was developed by a small team of programmers (one or two). 544236 people have purchased the game, this makes it quite an enterprise example as well.

Statistics

In the last 24 hours, 19384 people registered, and 6212 people bought the game.

Games started in the last 24 hours:
Minecraft Alpha: 60399
Minecraft Classic: 47565
3368 players online, in 1047 servers.
1717135 registered users, of which 544236 (31.69%) have bought the game.