With the announcement of Minecraft Earth, the series is taking things in a new an interesting direction. While it is an exciting prospect, let us also never forget that this is the 10th Anniversary of the original Minecraft. That’s right, 10 years ago today, the game officially launched it’s Beta for PC where it has since become a cultural phenomenon. Even more impressive is that Microsoft has revealed that the series has sold more than 176 million copies worldwide, making it one of the highest selling video games in history.
Just several months ago at MineCon, the company stated that those numbers were sitting at 150 million units, which is quite a jump in such a short time frame. However, the reason this is so significant is that if these numbers are accurate, then they may have finally surpassed the long reigning champion of most-sold copies of a video game; Tetris. It’s important to note that the last recorded sales numbers for Tetris was back in 2010, with just over 170 million, and they have since released two more iterations of the game, Tetris Effect and Tetris 99. Therefore, it’s more than likely that Minecraft hasn’t quite hit the unknown threshold that Tetris is probably at.
Regardless, its been an improbable run for the video game that only has blocks as it’s main feature. As most projects, it started out in a small knit community where it was only played by a handful of people. Slowly but surely it gained some momentum, and by the time it released out of Beta in 2011, their were already millions of different worlds that players had created for themselves and their friends. The amazing part about this is that despite the longevity of the series, Mojang, and now Microsoft, have continued to keep it fresh with new ideas and themes. At MineCon, the company announced Minecraft:Dungeons, an actual dungeon crawler built into the game.
Whether the it’s a game in the series, or a new update for the current one, one thing is for sure. Minecraft isn’t going anywhere anytime soon, and will probably continue to be played for years to come. Minecraft is available on PC and multiple other platforms. It’s basically on everything at this point.
