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How Minecraft Was Born
- dsego 13y agoTL;DR he ripped off Infiniminer.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- nicholassmith 13y agoNo, it doesn't. It talks about him being inspired by DF, and other games, then discusses Infiniminer and has a quote from him saying MineCraft was an Infiniminer clone.
- wolfgke 13y agoQuote from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zachary_Barth#Infiniminer http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zachary_Barth#Infiniminer "The visuals and mechanics of procedural generation and terrain deformation of Minecraft were drawn from Infiniminer. According to Minecraft author Markus Persson, after he discovered Infiniminer, he "decided it was the game he wanted to do". As a result, if one plays Infiniminer, one can note that the visuals of blocky graphics and carving out blocks as a miner are practically identical." So Minecraft probably is more than an Infiniminer clone.
- Smudge 13y agoYou forgot to include the bit about a bad citation: > "[not in citation given]" (Sounds like whoever wrote that "practically identical" bit may have had an agenda.) The visuals were certainly drawn from Infiniminer. But that's about as far as the similarities go -- Minecraft is ultimately a very different game.
- quarterto 13y agoGood artists copy. Great artists steal.
- deaconblues 13y agoJim Jarmusch: "Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic. Authenticity is invaluable; originality is non-existent. And don’t bother concealing your thievery - celebrate it if you feel like it. In any case, always remember what Jean-Luc Godard said: 'It’s not where you take things from - it’s where you take them to.' "
- InclinedPlane 13y agoInspiration is not the same thing as blatantly ripping off other games and passing them off as unique creations. Comandeer Keen started out as a project to copy Super Mario Bros. 3, for example. But is Comandeer Keen just a "rip off" of SMB 3? Hardly. And Minecraft is far from a rip off of infiniminer. If anything, today infiniminer is much more well known due to minecraft's success. Infiniminer is about as similar to minecraft as pong is to breakout.
- spacecadet 13y ago+1 for your defense of minecraft. -1 for Hacker's News staunch outlook on intellectual property. "Inspiration is not the same thing as blatantly ripping off other games and passing them off as unique creations. " Who said that was inspiration? -no one goes out to "blatantly" rip something off. Your lack of understanding speaks to your lack of creative experience, sorry.
- Grue3 13y agoWhat is "amazingly unlikely" about that though? Revolutionary games that create their own genres (Rogue, Adventure, Dune 2) are amazingly unlikely. Minecraft is just evolution of the games that already existed.
- FkZ 13y agoBut they play nothing alike. The mechanics aside from the representation of the world are incredibly different.
- bliss 13y agoNot sure of the others, but Dune 2 certainly didn't spontaneously big bang in a vacuum either, it was built on earlier iterations of similar games most notable being Herzog Zwei,whose english translation curiously enough is just 2 letters forward on a single letter, it translates as "Duke 2" that said, played the shit out of dune 2, what a game!
- namuol 13y agoRelevant: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/64/Doom_clone_vs_first_person_shooter.png http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/64/Doom_clon...
- wintermuteblog 13y agochrist its about time there was an article about this, I knew it for about 3 years = (
- Goronmon 13y agoIt's more like he took Infiniminer and made a fun game out of it.
- noonespecial 13y agoInfiniminer wasn't much fun. Minecraft is. That's about all there is to it.
- jere 13y agoYou read the article right? Especially the part where the creator of Infiniminer is tired of people saying that?
- jdmitch 13y agoI wonder if minecraft's financial success (after the initial stage where Persson couldn't have done it another way as the article argues) was because of the pricing model that bucked trends in the gaming world, signalling "this game is different", or if it was despite the difference?
- giulianob 13y agoI was pretty surprised when Minecraft was charging money for a fairly simple and uncompleted game. I was surprised because I had not seen that done very often. Now it's definitely more popular with things like Kickstarter but I think the fact he was asking for money early on helped a lot. If he had not asked for money, he may not have been able to develop the game to the level he did.
- asiekierka 13y agoA few thousand people bought the game in the first 6 months. Removing Swedish taxes, that was about $20k. That's not a bad motivator, you know.
- OvidNaso 13y agoSteam is now overloaded with "early access" game sales.
- dwc 13y agoBoth. Neither. There's a tendency to mimic currently successful pricing models, almost in a cargo cult manner. Looking at the product, the potential customers, etc. and actually making a decision is harder. But that's exactly how the currently successful pricing models were developed in the first place.
- benched 13y agoThe first time I tried to play Minecraft, I didn't understand it. Once I did understand the basic idea, I simply had to have the game. I would have gone through any sign-up process there was to get the game, and paid anything up to about $60. The game was different and was a watershed, regardless of inspirations. The sum of those inspirations was much bigger than the parts. I would guess that the success was mostly driven by sheer demand for a unique experience, plus network effects once it reached popularity.
- Torn 13y agoNotch described what later became Minecraft in a 2009 youtube, calling it an 'Infiniminer clone' he was working on http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F9t3FREAZ-k http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F9t3FREAZ-k
- GuiA 13y agoI've been involved in the indie game dev community for a while now, and I was an active member on the TIGSource forums when Markus first presented Minecraft there[0] (he still posted, at the time!) I remember from day one thinking it would be pretty cool if he could make infiminer with gameplay (at the time, he was talking of a capture the flag mode, and a "defend the castle you built from zombies" mode). Then he started charging $10 for preorders, which I thought was insane- who would pay money for a prototype that he'd probably abandon within 6 months anyway? (most indie game debs abandon their project- finishing a game puts you in the 0.0001%) But it actually worked, which surprised me. I finally preordered myself, because everyone was doing it to support him- I think I was order ~11 000 or so. I thought it was insane that he managed to get 10k+ preorders for his small project, and a little something clicked in my head then. Of course, now of over 12 million people have bought the game :) [1] [0] http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=6273.0 http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=6273.0 [1] https://minecraft.net/stats https://minecraft.net/stats
- itsybitsycoder 13y agoPreorders were $5, at least by the time I bought (in alpha), which IMO is a much more justifiable price for an impulse buy that might not work out. It was raised to $10 after it hit "beta" (which was after it was already popular and had made at least a million, IIRC).
- GuiA 13y agoHa, thanks for correcting this- faulty memory :) Even $5 was surprising, as most people on TIGS just post their demos and games for free- back then, most people made games with the only intention of making something cool. It's only recently that everyone builds a game with money in mind, and Minecraft was amongst the games to start that trend (remember, this was before Kickstarter et al.)
- lukaszdk 13y agoAfter watching Minecraft: The Story of Mojang [1] I was left with the impression that no one at Mojang really knows how to run a business, but since the cash from Minecraft just keeps coming in, everybody at Mojang is just having a great time. In this sense they a very much a like a startup learning to become a company, but without the financial pressure. It will be interesting to see if Minecraft will be a one-hit wonder for Mojang or if they will be able to grow into a company with sustainable profits from multiple IPs. [1] http://www.2playerproductions.com/projects/minecraft http://www.2playerproductions.com/projects/minecraft
- jebblue 13y agoPersonally I don't care if they never produce another hit, Minecraft is amazing and rarely does such an awesome game come along.
- imnoexpertbut 13y agoit's all about the gameplay.
- michaelgrafl 13y agoI thought 0x10c seemed really promising, both aesthetically and conceptually. I don't know anything about any of their other games. I don't think I'd like them much. The abortion of 0x10c is a real bummer though. I hope they had better reasons than just running out of excitement for it.
- VLM 13y agoWRT multiple IPs, I am interested to see how they interact with the mods ecosystem over time. Not so much can they make a twitter app or a 2-d platformer or something equally unrelated. I don't want a blocky minecraft looking pacman clone, at all. I'd pay more for the RailCraft mod than I paid for minecraft itself, in terms of enjoyment per $. Of course the RC mod is free ... Also I use buildcraft mod although the gold pipes suck for steam distribution, and I'd pay for buildcraft, although thats free. Thermal expansion has better steam distribution... The great mothership recently released a new minecraft version, which amounted to a couple new flowers and some biomes for people who don't mine, and nothing at all for anyone who does anything below the surface. Its called Minecraft, gentlemen, not fuzzy bunny craft so lose the giant mushroom biome please, and beg borrow or steal the buildcraft, railcraft, forestry, applied energetics, universal electricity, and a couple other mods so people who mine in MINEcraft actually have something fun to do rather than admiring double height grass blocks and mesa biomes. The other thing which is hilarious from a guy who's been into computers since 1981 is the mods ecosystem is from a software engineering / systems administration standpoint just a tiny bit more advanced than the msdos era, actually pretty close to my historical digging into MVS/360. So its 2013 and apt and dpkg and friends have existed since the very early 90s, but in 2013 the way you handle version dependence and bug tracking and distribution is you manually visit adware download spam sites and click 50 times to download a tiny mod, and then track version compatibility manually by visiting 50 decentralized web forums. Oh and don't get me started on people who think a 15 minute youtube video with awful video and music counts as the only form of "documentation" required. Dudes, its 2013 almost 2014 not the era of msdos 3.11 and warez BBS systems? It really does suck after using Linux since the early 90s and downshifting back to 1985, even though I run minecraft on linux (both client and server). Mojang should implement a minecraft mod store with a payment system thats trustworthy/reliable and very fast with excellent versioning compatibility. I'd pay $40 for railcraft and mojang can keep $10 of it and everyone else will be happy as long as I get $40 of actual service, like its very fast and completely transparent and highly reliable and effective and perhaps dare I ask, effectively and centrally documented and centrally bug tracked?
- notdrunkatall 13y agoEvery time I read a story about some unassuming person getting rich off of doing what they love, I always ask myself: how can I do this? Step 1: find something I love. Does lying in bed surfing the internet count? No? Damn.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- junto 13y agoBased on your comment and your username, you must be in bed, drunk and surfing the internet! :-) Here's an idea for a simple app that prevents you from phoning / texting your ex when you're drunk in bed. You have to (previous to being drunk) mark all of your contacts that you aren't supposed to contact when drunk and give reasons. Use the acceleromter to test if the user is able to stand up straight. If not then block certain outgoing calls / texts. Then place ads in bars that say, "Don't drunk text your ex tonight. Download the app... DTP (Drunk Text Protector)". Hint: You can charge a little extra for the app because the user is probably part drunk anyway. ;-) So, as the user, you get drunk and get home and text your ex 'Anna' and the app says: Your message to Anna was blocked. You previously told me that she was "some crazy bitch who slept with your best friend". If you really want to text Anna, then you can use one of your "go on be a dumb ass" credits to bypass this drunk text lock. You currently have [0] credits. Click here to purchase some now. If you really want to text Anna then you can, but you have to buy a "I'm an idiot" credit pack as an in-app purchase, which gives you a number of credits to text / phone people you shouldn't. Profit!
- greenlander 13y agolmfao
- thenmar 13y agohave you seen HBO's Girls? A character creates this app and starts a hip NYC startup
- 13y ago
- andygeers 13y agoI'm still not sure I'm entirely clear what about this story is "amazingly unlikely"?
- thomasfl 13y ago98% of all great startups are copycats, not original innovations. Markus copied the look and feel from infiniminer, but minecraft was far better executed.
- k__ 13y agoNo, he didn't just copy it, he looked what the players liked and what they didn't like, extracted the good stuff and made a game out of this. This is how everything remotely successful works. This is also why things later fail! The companies want more customers and add stuff to their products to appeal. But what they end with is a product, that doesn't reflect the good things extracted anymore, because they got bloated.
- coldcode 13y agoPassion > Business. Passion that makes a business is even better.
- dumbfounder 13y agoDoes anyone find it funny that Bezos is making money off this inaccurate book about himself, that he probably hates, by selling it in his store? And that his wife's bad review of the book probably drove more sales? (the rank is currently 83, earlier today in a Google cached version of the page the rank is 86) Not that he should/would pull the book or anything. Just kind of funny.
- era86 13y agoThanks for sharing. This is inspiring. Hope to grab a copy of the book!