You can build incredible things in Minecraft, from a space shuttle to Minas Tirith to a working computer. But even the coolest architectural wonder pales next to this ridiculous piece created by a pixel art master known as Thorlar Thorlarian.
That’s right. The picture at the top of this story is actually a top-down snapshot of a vast Minecraft world.
How vast? Thorlar used 1,128,960 Minecraft blocks to recreate the official wallpaper from the 2010 BlizzCon fan event. He did the entire thing by hand, dropping one block at a time. It took him nearly six months to complete it.
Don’t believe it? Here’s the video:
Thorlar’s insane work wasn’t just for the sake of art — it was also for charity. He live-streamed his work via Twitch, earning $3,500 for the Make-A-Wish foundation in the process. He’s raised over $11,000 since joining Twitch in 2014.
While his feat seems remarkable, Thorlar told PC Gamer that it was really just a matter of scale.
“Pixel art, when it comes down to it, is just like drawing with pen and paper,” he told the publication. “So with enough practice, it’s easy to know what blocks have what color, such as black being best represented by black wool, coal blocks, etc. At that point, no matter the size of your project, all you need to do is know what block would be most suitable for what area.”
Add about 1,000 hours of meticulously dropping blocks into place and, yeah, it’s a breeze. An interactive map of Thorlar’s work can be found here.
Minecraft runs on PCs, mobile devices and video game consoles like the Xbox.Microsoft
Microsoft said it has agreed to buy Mojang, the Swedish video game company behind the hit game Minecraft, boosting its mobile efforts and cementing control of another hit title for its Xbox console.
Minecraft, which has notched about 50 million copies sold, will be purchased by Microsoft for $2.5 billion, the company said in a statement. The move marks the tech giant's most ambitious video game purchase and the largest acquisition for Satya Nadella, its new chief executive.
"Minecraft is more than a great game franchise -- it is an open world platform, driven by a vibrant community we care deeply about, and rich with new opportunities for that community and for Microsoft," Nadella said in a statement.
Markus Persson, Mojang's founder and the creative mind behind the hit game, will be departing the company.
Through it all, Mojang has sold copies of its game to customers on mobile devices, computers and video game consoles.In Minecraft, Microsoft is taking control of a game that has become a cultural phenomenon. Released in 2009, the game made its mark by having no particular point or goal -- it asked nothing of players and let them merely create their own worlds and explore others. Some people fought zombies, others meticulously recreated their favorite science fiction starships.
"The 'Minecraft' players have taken the game and turned it into something that surpassed all of our expectations. The acquisition by Microsoft brings a new chapter to the incredible story of 'Minecraft,'" said Mojang CEO Carl Manneh said in a statement.
But Minecraft is much more than just another video game for Microsoft. Much like the purchase of Halo maker Bungie 14 years ago, Mojang and its Minecraft franchise will strengthen Microsoft's position as a top destination for entertainment.
The game is available on Microsoft's Xbox, in addition to the competing PlayStation, and a host of mobile devices. Analysts believe Microsoft could harness Minecraft's cultural popularity to encourage customers to buy its devices, potentially by offering unique levels or features for its Xbox or devices running its Windows Phone and desktop Windows software.
Whatever Microsoft's ultimate plans, the move will also bring under the company's wing yet another successful video game franchise. In January, Microsoft said it was purchasing the Gears of War fantasy war game franchise from Epic, the company that developed and produced the title since its release in 2006. That game had sold 22 million units, grossing over $1 billion.
The other large game from Microsoft is Halo, the space-age war-themed franchise it bought in 2000. The Halo series has sold more than 50 million copies since it first debuted in 2001. More importantly, however, the game attracted a new generation of video game players to Microsoft's then new Xbox device, the only console for which Halo has ever been made available.
Halo's success has been driven by its epic storyline, told in books, movies, comic books, toys, and, of course, video games.
Minecraft is in many ways the opposite type of game -- it has no storyline to speak of, but instead inspires customers to play with it however they please. Its simplistic blocky imagery is one of its standout features, and its initially simplistic game play has drawn gamers of all stripes in addition to parents and school teachers.
A different type of game maker
Persson, who calls himself "Notch" on social media sites, won't be joining Microsoft.
"The founders: Notch, Carl [Manneh], and Jakob [Porser] are leaving," Mojang said in a blog post. "We don't know what they're planning. It won't be Minecraft-related but it will probably be cool."
The move isn't much of a surprise. The Wall Street Journal said the deal came together because Persson in June published a missive on Twitter saying he was frustrated with customer complaints over changes his team had been making to the game. "Anyone want to buy my share of Mojang so I can move on with my life," he wrote. "Getting hate for trying to do the right thing is not my gig." Microsoft came calling a month later, according to the WSJ's account.
Persson has also been an outspoken critic of other video game makers. In March, he expressed disappointment in Facebook's acquisition of virtual reality technology pioneer Oculus VR. "Facebook creeps me out," he wrote at the time, vowing he would end that development effort.
He has even been critical of Microsoft in the past, speaking out against the company's Windows 8 operating system in 2012 after the company announced plans for an app store and strict rules for access. "I'd rather have Minecraft not run on Windows 8 at all than to play along," he wrote. "Maybe we can convince a few people not to switch to Windows 8 that way."
Mojang, which also makes the games Scrolls and Cobalt, was vague about other potential personnel shifts: "Though it's too early to confirm which of us will continue working on Minecraft or other projects, we predict that the vast majority (if not all) Mojangstas will continue to work at Mojang for the time being."
Microsoft expects the deal to close in late 2014, and is expected to be break-even by fiscal 2015.
The software titan said it will continue to make Minecraft available across all platforms.
As gaming takes centre stage in the lives of digital consumers, tech companies try to cash in on the trend.
Parents like Minecraft because it can be a creative outlet for their children. Teachers like the game because it can bring lessons to life. And Microsoft likes the game so much that the tech giant wants to buy Minecraft’s parent company for more than $2 billion.
It is not flashy graphics or an intricate story line luring these groups to the game, however. Minecraft has become a global phenomenon by breaking with those conventions.
The point of the game is building things - and tens of millions of people spend hours constructing elaborate structures with digital pickaxes and other tools - and helping others make their own creations.
The game’s popularity has been clear for a couple of years. But the possible deal with Microsoft is the clearest sign yet how important tech giants view games like Minecraft and their growing fan bases. Already, Facebook bought a virtual reality headset maker for $2 billion, and SoftBank of Japan spent $1.5 billion for a stake in a mobile game developer. Last month, Amazon agreed to buy Twitch, a streaming video site, for more than $1 billion.
More than any of those other deals, though, buying Minecraft for billions would be an acknowledgment that gaming is central to many people’s lives. The rise of mobile devices has put games at the fingertips of practically everyone, an engaging mode of entertainment or merely a time killer.
“It’s as if all these old people who don’t play games woke up and suddenly said, 'Oh my god, gaming is the thing,'” said James L McQuivey, an analyst at Forrester Research.
Microsoft, of course, recognised the significance of games more than a decade ago, when it released the original Xbox gaming console. Since then, though, tectonic shifts in the industry, brought about by the rise of mobile devices and the Internet, have turned consoles into just one of many outlets for playing games.
Minecraft, created in Sweden, stands out because it has been a hit on nearly every digital device. It ranks as the top paid app for the iPhone and second for the iPad. Mojang, Minecraft’s parent company, said in June that sales of the console version of Minecraft had collectively passed those for computers. In all, the company said then, a total of nearly 54 million copies had been sold.
Games have become the most lucrative category of content in the mobile world, and that growth has driven many of the investments in video games by giant tech companies.
In part, companies like Microsoft want to make sure that the top games are available on their devices. Minecraft is not available on Windows Phones, Microsoft’s struggling mobile device. In an email to Microsoft employees this year, Satya Nadella, the company’s chief executive, said that games were “the single biggest digital life category, measured in both time and money spent.”
Minecraft soaks up lots of time, as players can spend months building estates and entire countries, working away with pixelated ladders and building blocks. The game has succeeded partly by demolishing generational and gender boundaries that usually carve the games business into separate categories. Girls are among the most avid players of Minecraft, and it is one of the few games that parents play with young children. While players can attack the avatars of others in the game, it is a decidedly ungory experience.
In addition, Mojang lets its users create their own game servers on their computers so they can meet up with friends in their own private online worlds. Mojang sells copies of the game, rather than giving Minecraft away and charging players for add-on purchases, as many publishers do.
“It’s a complete outlier,” said Tero Kuittinen, a managing director at Frank N Magid Associates, a media consulting firm. “Whatever the industry does, there’s always room for one or two who do the complete opposite.”
In the summer of 2010, Joel Levin was a teacher at the Columbia Grammar and Preparatory School in New York when he began playing Minecraft with his daughter, who was then 5. Although his family had no backyard of its own in the city, she constructed a tree house in Minecraft.
His daughter even learned to spell her first word in the game when she pecked out the command “HOME” so that her avatar could teleport back to her treehouse. Levin was so excited about the educational potential for Minecraft that he began using it as a teaching tool in his second-grade technology class.
He eventually quit to co-found a startup, TeacherGaming, that sells custom-made versions of Minecraft to classrooms for educational purposes. About 2,700 schools in the United States, Europe, Australia and other countries are using the product, MinecraftEdu, to teach science lessons in which students test theories about gravity and history lessons in which they explore models of ancient Babylon.
“People were ready for a game like Minecraft whose purpose was creation instead of destruction,” Levin said.
Minecraft’s passionate fans have become a valuable tool for promoting the game to others. Thousands of them assemble nearly each year at a convention held by Mojang called MineCon. And Minecraft videos are among the most popular in the games category on YouTube.
“It’s the first game to really capitalize on the generation that watches games almost more than they play,” said Cliff Bleszinski, a veteran game designer. Minecraft was created in 2009 by Markus Persson, a Swedish game programmer who goes by the gamer name Notch and remains Mojang’s largest shareholder. In a blog post last year, Persson said he wanted to make a game where players could do almost anything they wanted to.
“No fake doors that don’t lead anywhere, no trees you can’t cut down, and no made-up story being told to the player to motivate them,” he wrote. “Instead, the player would make their own story and interact with the game world, decide for themselves what they want to do.”
The rising popularity of Minecraft brought great wealth for Persson but unwanted pressures too. In June, Mojang faced an outcry from members of the Minecraft community after it changed its policies related to people who run Minecraft servers for profit. Persson said on Twitter that he was fed up with the criticism. “Anyone want to buy my share of Mojang so I can move on with my life?” he wrote. “Getting hate for trying to do the right thing is not my gig.”
While the entire gaming community is waiting for a formal announcement from developers, the actual people who are working on the Minecraft PS4 edition had some important announcement to make.
They admitted on Twitter that there are thousands of gamers who want to know whether the title update 14 as well as the next gen game version is shaping up fast. The team confirmed that it is indeed going good and they are busy working to get it out on the right time. Even though they are planning to roll out an update for PS3 platform and also bring the next gen game out, Sony may or may not allow them to do so. It is unclear at the moment whether the company will approve the certification testing process for the new game as well as the TU14 at the same time. They may choose to postpone it to a later date and release the new title first for eager fans to play it on their newly purchased console.
TU14 Is on PS4
As of now, the developers didn’t have a formal announcement to make mainly because they are purely focused on getting the games out in time. The company will decide the proposed released dates but 4J Studios confirmed that they are indeed working to bring it out at the earliest. Answering the questions posted by gamers, the team said that they couldn’t make any announcements final mainly because until the game is ready for release and submission for certificate processing, no official word can be given. The Minecraft PS4 edition will launch directly with the title update 14 along with all the features that are available on PC already. The update titled 1.3.1 brought new changes including anvil interface, trading with NPC villagers, desert temples and much more. Next gen console owners will get all these along with some exclusive texture packs as well, if latest news is to be believed.
Use Quills to Write On Books
4J Studios continuously kept gamers busy with new screenshot updates that confirmed some of the features that are about to land officially on the Minecraft PS4 edition. It included the anvil interface which has great anticipation among players for its ability to rename items, repair them and also combine enchantments. The concept of being able to write on a book with quill is said to be part of the next gen game version as well but one has to wait to know if it will make it to the final version. It is already available on computers but they make use of the typing facility available. If console gamers will enjoy leaving notes for entities and other players, it will most probably make it to the final edition.
Regarding the title update 14, 4J Studios said that it may be weeks away before it finally makes it way to certificate testing. They did not have any formal news on Twitter about the release date for Minecraft PS4 but based on these frequent updates, one can expect it to be close.
