The first question I asked Melmoth about Minecraft was “Why am I punching a chicken with some sand?”
He’d extolled its virtues to me, see, so I’d figured “what the heck”, grabbed it, launched straight into a single player game knowing nothing about it. Tutorials are for the weak! I landed on the beach of a blocky world, jumped around a bit, found some trees and some roving livestock, clicked the mouse button causing my blocky hand to flail around a bit, picked up some sand, and attacked a chicken with it. Had no idea what was going on, so I asked Melmoth what I was supposed to be doing. And he explained.
I don’t know whether to praise it to the heavens, or warn you off in case you get hooked as well and never emerge.
Good write-up. I started playing about a fortnight ago, and god I love this game. It seems quite simple at first, but there is so much depth to it. I checked the stats page on minecraft,net earlier – 10000 copies sold in the last 24 hours!
My recent excavations have got some depth all right… least ’til I hit some lava…
10,000 copies in 24 hours is some going, not to mention the 600,000 Euros frozen in a PayPal account recently, wouldn’t be surprised if most development is now being done on a MASSIVE YACHT!
Surely you mean a massive Throat Warbler Mangrove?
The stats page show that he’s sold over 200,000 copies since starting development in 2009, which means he’s earned over 2M Euros… In a year!
Good luck to him though, obviously he’s tapped into some sort of gamer cultural explory sandbox zeitgeist and by offering the ability to share that at a very cheap price (to the individual) he’s reaping the reward…