Before MC notch was dealing with severe burnout and imposter syndrome where he was working on flip phone games for king. He would try to enter gamejams but felt his games lacked an x factor and constantly failed to meet the deadlines.
At some point whilst working on the prototype for rubydung he was gifted a box set of the first 3 seasons of lost which he binged. It gave him the idea to make a game about survival in a pictureque and familiar but eerie world, this is why one of the earliest features of the game was the cave noises and soundtrack. (https://youtu.be/mqi2pAHdrqs?si=m3pi4FOilaeMbt3Z)
C418 showed us it's lonely, ambient, but there's still an optimism there. The world is scary but you can make it safe. The melancholy it evokes fades away to comfort as gradually you build in safety even at night.
Notch was also inspired by paradise lost by john milton with steve being a fallen angel of some kind stuck in one of the layers of hell without recollection of his past life, he never elaborated on that idea and it may have been a joke, but there's some proof if you consider the zombies and skeletons appearance and the dimensions/religious symbolism.
That transition from wilderness to civilization, your earliest nights a scramble to build rudimentary shelter, and your safety directly grows in proportion to how much you've conquered, tamed, and settled around you.
minecraft used to perfectly surrogate the intrinsic human expression of the soul. For man to bend nature to his will without destroying its essence. Knowing it's pursuit to end his life is just a part of existence and separating himself from fearing it leveraging what it provides and his own hands without eradicating it. Harmony and awe, what Hillary & Norgay felt on the first ascent of Everest.
But now they have to keep adding stuff to it because Microsoft spent 2 billion dollars on it. It's bloated so it can be in a perpetual update cycle and keep attracting a new playerbase.
Good article, I agree with everything except "the code wasn't written by a professional programmer", Notch had worked for years as a programmer before making Minecraft. The criticism of his code is mostly by Dunning-Kruger fools with a small amount of erroneous knowledge about what "good code" supposedly is, but who know next to nothing about making a game. His choice of programming language may be questionable, but you don't make something like Minecraft from scratch in 2009 unless you're a good programmer, which is obvious to anyone who actually makes games.
Yeah I definitely do think that a lot of the people criticizing Notch's code have hardly any coding knowledge themselves, let alone to make something on the level of even early Minecraft. Even if Beta is unoptimized, so is modern Minecraft. I believe Notch had sort of an "if it works, it works" mindset when he was coding for Minecraft which yeah, it did work considering the game became a massive success. The point I was trying to make is that Notch didn't have all the pieces together from the start but he had a passion for programming.
I just don't understand the appeal of modern minecraft. If I want to play a min/max power fantasy adventure/exploration rpg I will play a big modpack. Minecraft is heading in this direction but they can't add anything cool or it would change the game too much. So they just add lame gay shit and mobs that don't drop anything because they are endangered.
If I want to play actual Minecraft I play old versions or legacy console version (I think its on 1.13) on my WiiU lmao
Before MC notch was dealing with severe burnout and imposter syndrome where he was working on flip phone games for king. He would try to enter gamejams but felt his games lacked an x factor and constantly failed to meet the deadlines.
At some point whilst working on the prototype for rubydung he was gifted a box set of the first 3 seasons of lost which he binged. It gave him the idea to make a game about survival in a pictureque and familiar but eerie world, this is why one of the earliest features of the game was the cave noises and soundtrack. (https://youtu.be/mqi2pAHdrqs?si=m3pi4FOilaeMbt3Z)
C418 showed us it's lonely, ambient, but there's still an optimism there. The world is scary but you can make it safe. The melancholy it evokes fades away to comfort as gradually you build in safety even at night.
Notch was also inspired by paradise lost by john milton with steve being a fallen angel of some kind stuck in one of the layers of hell without recollection of his past life, he never elaborated on that idea and it may have been a joke, but there's some proof if you consider the zombies and skeletons appearance and the dimensions/religious symbolism.
That transition from wilderness to civilization, your earliest nights a scramble to build rudimentary shelter, and your safety directly grows in proportion to how much you've conquered, tamed, and settled around you.
minecraft used to perfectly surrogate the intrinsic human expression of the soul. For man to bend nature to his will without destroying its essence. Knowing it's pursuit to end his life is just a part of existence and separating himself from fearing it leveraging what it provides and his own hands without eradicating it. Harmony and awe, what Hillary & Norgay felt on the first ascent of Everest.
But now they have to keep adding stuff to it because Microsoft spent 2 billion dollars on it. It's bloated so it can be in a perpetual update cycle and keep attracting a new playerbase.
Very enlightening, I've always felt that nostalgia is not enough to summarize my dislike for the new version.
Good article, I agree with everything except "the code wasn't written by a professional programmer", Notch had worked for years as a programmer before making Minecraft. The criticism of his code is mostly by Dunning-Kruger fools with a small amount of erroneous knowledge about what "good code" supposedly is, but who know next to nothing about making a game. His choice of programming language may be questionable, but you don't make something like Minecraft from scratch in 2009 unless you're a good programmer, which is obvious to anyone who actually makes games.
Yeah I definitely do think that a lot of the people criticizing Notch's code have hardly any coding knowledge themselves, let alone to make something on the level of even early Minecraft. Even if Beta is unoptimized, so is modern Minecraft. I believe Notch had sort of an "if it works, it works" mindset when he was coding for Minecraft which yeah, it did work considering the game became a massive success. The point I was trying to make is that Notch didn't have all the pieces together from the start but he had a passion for programming.
I just don't understand the appeal of modern minecraft. If I want to play a min/max power fantasy adventure/exploration rpg I will play a big modpack. Minecraft is heading in this direction but they can't add anything cool or it would change the game too much. So they just add lame gay shit and mobs that don't drop anything because they are endangered.
If I want to play actual Minecraft I play old versions or legacy console version (I think its on 1.13) on my WiiU lmao