> Even still, the fact that the core game can be recreated without too much effort does suggest that that it was more about being a good idea than being difficu

> Even still, the fact that the core game can be recreated without too much effort does suggest that that it was more about being a good idea than being difficult to implement As someone that's "recreated the core game" a few different times using a few different techniques (Unity, then Unreal, then OpenGL twice) this just isn't true. Minecraft is very deceptive in the fact that it looks simple, but recreating the core of Minecraft alpha is incredibly time consuming and difficult. Most of the clones you see don't truly recreate the core either, they'll add very simple biome generation, chunking, and some player movement and lighting. The core of Minecraft alpha consisted of: mobs, "smart" blocks (fences that join to other fences, interactable blocks, animatable blocks etc), water, lava, physics, pathfinding AI, inventory management, crafting system, Redstone (this is actually pretty huge because it's not trivial figuring out how to properly update chunks), multiplayer networking (also not trivial by a long shot), survival mode, biomes and the nether. Just building the base game with all of that will take around a year of full time dev work, which it did take Notch around that much time. Additionally, making all of these systems good and fast is a whole 'nother story. There are so many optimizations that can be made that add a lot of extra dev time to the mix. So, sure, creating a cool blocky chunk renderer where you can add and break blocks can be done in like a week. But Minecraft alpha is not a simple endeavor, and I don't think it would have taken off the way it did if Notch just left out all the actual game mechanics. > I don't look at Minecraft and think "wow I could never do this." Instead I look at it and think, "Wow. That was a really great idea." And again, I know what you mean by this because I thought the same thing, but this couldn't be further from the truth! It's funny how I wildly misjudge the amount of effort that making a thing takes until I try to make that thing. And we also have to remember that before you can even begin to create Minecraft you need all the prerequisite knowledge of how the graphics pipeline works and how rendering in general works. But anyways, I just wanted to interject some personal experience here and mention that a lot of the "simple details" cough multiplayer are actually pretty tough to pull off :D