Minecraft, one might have noticed, is kind of a big deal. If you’re the sort of person who reads about videogames on the Internet, which seems like a safe assumption, it would have taken a directed force of will to avoid hearing about it by now. So you probably already know that it’s a sandbox style game that takes place in a procedurally generated world made up of one-meter blocks that can be mined and crafted to create everything from a simple sod house to a scale replica of the starship Enterprise. Or an automated pooping butt. Or a gigantic mechanical player piano. Or a scale recreation of most of Middle Earth. Or… yeah, the sense of awe at the outrageous feats of engineering players have cobbled together is only eclipsed by the sales of the game itself and the subculture that has sprouted up around it.
Almost two years ago Minecraft went from a weird indie project with a cult following to a million-seller that’s still earning nearly $200,000 a day in sales, and that was before the game was officially released. This game that one guy slapped together has now become the nucleus of a massive fandom — one that just enjoyed its first major convention in Vegas over this past weekend. Hell, some guy made an entire concept album about the game’s iconic suicide-bombing creepers. This last Halloween you may have even encountered your first Minecraft costumes in the wild, and when you open your door to see a kid wearing a hand-painted cardboard box creeper mask making that blood curdling “SSSSSsss” sound, there’s really nothing to do other than dump the entire candy bowl into their bag while kicking yourself for not being Notch — who is one can only assume is spending his days swimming like a tophat-wearing duck in an Olympic sized swimming pool filled with Euros.
