Yep, I remember people playing this in class when you could only place a couple of blocks and nothing more.
The whole concept of "block building" was new at the time, which I think is why it's hard to imagine why it was so cool back then. It's so ubiquitous now.
Markus is also a really interesting guy, despite perhaps some of his controversy. I spoke with him a few times on social media, where he talked about implementing the Minecraft tessellator in a single day, and that he took interest in some of the NES dev tooling I was working on.
I remember playing the web demo and being absolutely captivated. I must have been around 11.
Still like the game, though I feel that since starting around 1.8, the magic has been lost a little. More recently, with Microsoft apparently adding everything to the game that someone's 6 year old said would be cool, it's lost a lot of its charm. Imagine taking Chess and adding 10 new types of pawn with special abilities - thats cool, sure, but it kinda makes away with a lot of why the original game was so good.
The web demo I remember was only creative mode the survival didn't work properly or something. There were sponge blocks that would soak up water. I also had my son play the demo. I bought the dev version not long after. My first world was snowy because randomly some seeds would be set to a winter world. This was before biomes or even the Nether.
The game had many issues in the early days. Falling through the bottom of the world because there were holes. I remember people in the forum complaining that their creations caught on fire because Markus made lava burn things instead of just being decorative and then there was one patch which made chests explode if you opened them. I still play sometimes but it just doesn’t feel the same anymore, most likely due to nostalgia.
The whole concept of "block building" was new at the time, which I think is why it's hard to imagine why it was so cool back then. It's so ubiquitous now.
Markus is also a really interesting guy, despite perhaps some of his controversy. I spoke with him a few times on social media, where he talked about implementing the Minecraft tessellator in a single day, and that he took interest in some of the NES dev tooling I was working on.
Cool find! Brought back memories.