Minecraft: Part Two

How did Minecraft get started? What exactly happens in this game? How has it evolved since it launched?

Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Get in techt with technology with text stuff from how
stuff works dot com either everyone, and welcome to tex Stuff.
I'm Jonathan Strick and I and we've got a topic
that you guys are really gonna dig. Did you do
that pun in the first the first episode about Minecraft?

(00:24):
I don't know, because I didn't listen to it before
the show, but I probably did so. So way back
when Jonathan and Mr Chris Pollette did an episode about Minecraft,
and it has been suggested by essentially the Internet that
we do another one. Yeah, it turns out that people
love this game so much that one episode is not enough.

(00:46):
In fact, I think there are plenty of people out
there who would just like it if we had mind
stuff instead of text stuff. But we're not going to
do that. But we are going to update that old
podcast because, as it turns out, back then when Chris
and I corded the episode, neither of us had really
played around with Minecraft at all. We had watched some
videos on YouTube, we had read up on it, we

(01:07):
had done our research, but we hadn't actually played it.
And so at that point in time, it was still
in beta, the official version had not been released. They
have been taking pre orders, but there, but the official
version had not come out yet, it was still just
a beta program. And um yeah, it just turned out
that it was to us to Christen myself, it was
like Pokemon, something that we could research but didn't really understand.

(01:31):
And and I do want to say I have actually
not played Minecraft, so so Jonathan has at this point
since he is the expert. However, I will I will
go ahead and be up front. I have played Minecraft
on Xbox three sixty, which all die hard fans of
Minecraft and even casual fans. No, is a much more
simple version of Minecraft than the one you can find

(01:52):
on PCs and Max. But we'll we'll get into all
of that. Yeah. Yeah, it's you know, we really wanted
to do another at so because the Minecraft culture has
become such a thing. It's you know, I mean for
a game that was that was only released in two
thousand nine as sold over thirty million copies. You know,
they have a merge deal with Lego. It's an independent game. Yeah,

(02:13):
it's kind of No one was ever expecting this to
be this big of a thing, certainly not the man
who who programmed it. But it's funny because the Lego
thing to me just means it's gone full circle, right,
because when you look at Minecraft, if you're trying to
explain what Minecraft is to someone who has never played it,
you're like, well, it's blocks, and you put the blocks
together and then you form bigger things that are kind

(02:34):
of blocky, like, oh, so it's like virtual Lego and
kinda it's kind of like that, but there there's so
much more to it, right if you can make the
legos do stuff, combining them in special if you were
to get the Robotic Lego set and then merge it
with say the Lord of the Rings Lego set, and
the magic worked, but now there are actual legs. Yes,

(02:55):
and there were zombies. You have to put the Walking
Dead Lego set, and I'm pretty sure there's not one,
but but you know, I'm sure there are zombies. There
have to be zombie legos. I'm sure there have to be,
but they're at least dead pirate legos anyway, So the
basic game. We're going to cover what the basic game
is so that those of you who have never played
Minecraft but I've heard about it can understand what we're

(03:17):
talking about. So you're you go into a world that
is essentially created for you. When you first start, the
world gets created uh systematically where it has a distribution
of resources that is different from game to game. Um,
you play a little blocky character inhabiting this world. During

(03:37):
the day, this world is idyllic. You have little piggy's
and and and cowie's sheep sheep bees and doggies and
caddies running around. They're not called that, you know, not caddies.
It's not golf game. Um, but no, they're these animals
running around. You've got beautiful forests, You've got scenic snowy landscapes, mountains, caverns, oceans,

(03:58):
all this kind of stuff. And uh, when nightfalls, the
monsters come out and they try to kill you. And
so if you're playing it on just the classic Minecraft mode,
which is also called Survival mode, your goal, at least
early on is just survival. You're trying to gather materials
build a protective house for you to to stay in

(04:20):
at night so that way the monsters don't get you,
and then you can explore and build out your your house.
I've heard that, in fact, most players do not survive
the first night. No, it's true because if you've never
played Minecraft before and you haven't any idea of how
to build stuff because there's there's not really there's no
instruction manual. When you start playing, you have to craft things.

(04:43):
You'd gather resources, raw materials, and then you craft useful
materials out of them. Now, technically, if you wanted to,
you could craft a house out of the raw material
of wood. But that means that every single block of
your house, and a block represents like one cubic meter,
it's one meter by one or by one meter um,
each block of your house would be one block of wood.

(05:04):
So you'd have to knock down the equivalent number of
trees to create a house that was the right size
to protect you. Also, I imagine that that wouldn't be
as strong as a house made of other Actually this, well,
it wouldn't be as flammable if you made it out
of stone. Uh. Strength is kind of it depends. There's
only one thing that really can cause huge amounts of

(05:26):
damage to your house, and that's a creeper. Uh. And
I'll talk about that in a second. But anyway, so
you what you could do is by crafting, you could
convert raw material wood into planks, and so one block
of wood would equal several blocks of planks. Thus you
would extend the usefulness of that one block of resource
and be able to, you know, put down say four

(05:48):
blocks of planks for every one block of wood. That
means you don't have to gather as much stuff. You
have increased your efficiency. It's teaching new lessons, mostly in
how not to die. These are my favorite. Yeah. So
then you can also make tools that make it easier
for you to gather materials. You can make tools that
let you gather other materials like stone, so you can

(06:10):
build something out of stone if you wanted to. You
can build it out of metal if you were able
to find enough metal. There there are veins of various
ores in the Minecraft world, and depending upon which version
of Minecraft you're playing, you may have just a couple
like iron ore or gold or diamonds something like that.
So various metals and minerals um. If you are playing
the PC version, there are a lot more that are available,

(06:33):
so you can get like aluminum or aluminium uh, and
copper and things like that and ten uh. You can't
do that on the Xbox version yet, right, And there
are all different kinds of combinations or recipes that you
can use to put these the little bits of things
into other little bits of things and create new stuff.
I think that there's about a hundred and eighty or

(06:54):
more right now. Yeah, and then there again the PC version,
they're far more common sations you can make, and it's
less intuitive, Like I think anyone who's played the PC
version who then tries to play the Xbox version remarks
and how dumbed down the Xbox version is, because, for example,
if I want to craft something in the Xbox version,
I really just have to have the basic materials to

(07:16):
make that thing, and then it does a lot of
the work for me. In the classic Minecraft, you have
a little crafting grid that opens up, and you have
to place the raw materials in a specific formation within
that grid to get the output you want. So, for example,
it may be that a plank and two sticks could
make a wooden axe or wooden pick axe or woulden shovel,

(07:38):
but it all depends on where you place them within
that grid on what you get. Fortunately, that's not the
case for the Xbox version, so I don't have to
remember all that. As for the other modes, just really
quickly the other basic modes you can play in this game,
there's creative. Creative just means that you can build and
it's just it lets you go crazy and do what
you want without needing to protect yourself from monsters at

(08:01):
the end of the day or gather materials. You actually
have all them. It's like you have an infinite supply
of everything that's in the game. So then you can
build whatever structure you want if you wanted to. You
could build a world and then allow other people to
come into it. So because you can create a server
so that other people can play within your world, and
that way, you might use the creative mode to create

(08:23):
a very interesting world for them to inhabit and potentially destroy,
depending upon what levels of permission you give the other
players and whether or not they're heads. Yeah, there's you're
always going to get a big MENI head. There's also
the hardcore mode, which is terrifying to me. Hardcore is
that if you die, that's it. Uh So, for example,

(08:43):
if I create a world and it's self contained, I
don't have it connected to the internet. I'm just playing
by myself, but I'm playing in hardcore mode. If my
character dies, it deletes the world. So all the work
I've done, I might have made the world's largest castle
in Minecraft, and trust me, that's always one of my goals. Um,
but if I die, I lose it, it's gone. I

(09:04):
can't retrieve it. If it's multiplayer and you die, you
get ejected from the server and banned, so you can't
rejoin the game. Uh, it just gives you a message
saying sorry, you're banned from the server. Technically, the administrator
could allow you back in, but it would require some
work on the administrator's part to delete some uh some
bits of code within the server world. So most people

(09:26):
I don't think would go through the trouble um. And
then finally you have adventure mode. And an adventure mode,
people who come into your world are not allowed to
destroy blocks unless they have the proper tools for that
particular block. So, for example, for a block of stone,
they would have to have a pickaxe. Normally, in the game,
if you punch something long enough, it'll break. Uh. Some

(09:48):
some materials are harder than others and thus take longer
to punch to break, Like if you are talking about Obsidian,
I hope you packed a lunch, but uh, you know,
in adventure mode you cannot do it unless you have
the right materials. Well, that gets pretty tricky because most
materials have at the very base of it would if
you don't have an ax, you can't chop down wood.
So when you start off an adventure mode, you can't

(10:10):
even gather the most basic materials, so you have to
kind of adventure around in the world to find stuff
that can protect you. Once night comes and the monsters
come out, then if you encounter things like chests, you
might find the basic tools you need to do some
more gathering, and then you can finally start to play
the game as if you were playing in survival mode.

(10:30):
So those are your four basic modes keep in mind,
and we'll talk about this later in the podcast. The
the community around Minecraft has created so many different modifications
or just mods for the game that these are just
the basic ways of playing. There are dramatically different experiences
on Minecraft based upon the way people have modified the

(10:52):
game and given it different skins or different behaviors, and
we'll talk about some of those a little bit later on.
So that's your basis for the Minecraft games. It's an
incredibly simple concept that gets more and more complex as
more features have been added into the game over the
course of its lifetime, and also as more players have,

(11:13):
as he said, created these mods that have you know,
it's it's a really self developing community, which is pretty fascinating. Uh.
Do you want to talk a little bit about the
man who started at all? Marcus person Yes, I was
about to say, I didn't look up any of the
the pronunciation, so I'm glad you did because I looked

(11:33):
at your notes and I saw that you had some
fonetics in there. Um, Now is it? Is it moo young?
Is the name of his company? Will get into it,
but yesu Yang, I think, But yes, I always go
Japanese Young. Sorry, but yes, so Marcus person Um better
perhaps known on the internet as not Yeah, we'll go
with Notch for the rest of this podcast. Really, he's
a thirty four as of this podcast in October. Um

(11:58):
grew up in Sweden, if you could not tell from
our mispronunciation of his name, Um, and Uh learned learned
to use a family computer when he was very young
at commodore. Yep. He his father was a railroad worker,
and so I guess he probably got some appreciation for
the basis of Minecraft just from from being the son
of a railroad worker. Uh. Grew up playing various bootleg games,

(12:20):
and I was particularly fond of a legit version of
The Bard's Tale. I think that was the first one
that he owned. It was the first game he bought
with his own money. And I can appreciate that because
I also owned a copy of The Bard's Tale and
also enjoyed when he was a child playing all playing
around with some of the programming codes that they used
to publish. In the back of programming magazine. Yea, he
talked about how his sister would read out the code

(12:42):
and then he would type it into the computer, and
that sometimes he would make a mistake, and he realized
that if he made a mistake, the program would behave
in a way it was not intended, and he, rather
than getting frustrated over this, felt a sense of power.
It's a huge rush. Yeah. He worked in Webb Design originally.
I think a few of his teachers had kind of
pushed him more towards graphic design. Yeah, he wanted to go.

(13:05):
He knew at a very early age that he was
interested in game program Yeah. He and his he and
his buddies in school. When he was a teenager, he
became a group of h He joined a group of
kids who were all interested in programming. They we're using
a tar e st computers at that point, trying to
outdo each other, and he knew that that's kind of
what he wanted to do. He wanted to develop games,
but his teacher said, maybe you should go into graphic

(13:27):
design instead. There's this whole web thing that's taking place.
If you were a web designer, you can make huge
amounts of cash. And so he went into web development.
And then something happened, something big happened. Well, I I
believe he quit to become a game designer. He was like,
you know what, never mind, I'm going to follow my
dream and and quit his job, tried to become a
game designer, and the dot com crash happened. Yeah, And

(13:49):
when the dot com crash happened, it wiped out jobs
across the board on a global scale. We think of
it here in the US as a largely US centered thing,
but this was a global events um So he was
out of work for a couple of years, but finally
got into a web game company, working programming in Flash. Yeah,
and he built around thirty games in Flash and also

(14:11):
pursued programming in other ways. He was really interested in
learning how to make very small efficient programs, sort of
how can I use the least amount of code to
achieve the thing I want to do? So this is
not necessarily the same pathway that hackers take. Hackers will
often say I want X result, so I'm going to

(14:32):
do whatever I can to get to X result, which
means your code might be work, might work, but it
might not be very elegant. He was looking at ways
of making it a very small and compact program so
that it's very portable. You can you can use that
code on multiple devices or multiple machines that have different
levels of complexity, so that way you don't you know,

(14:54):
you're not limited to just well this this program works,
but you better have the hardware that can chuggle longer elds.
It's never going to be satisfying experience. Um. This was
right around the time we're getting up towards the late
two thousand's, when he had been working at this company
for a while. He had been designing flash games, and

(15:14):
he came across a game in two thousand nine called
Infino Minor. Right. Yeah, you and Chris had talked talked
about this one on the previous podcast. Yes, so in
Phinno Minor. If you were to just read a basic
description of infinom Minor, he might say, hah, this sounds
hauntingly familiar because it was a block based game, a
multiplayer game where it was a sandbox game, and you

(15:35):
could mind things and build stuff with the stuff you mind,
you would gather materials and build objects, and so it
sounds a lot like Minecraft. Well, that's no mistake. I mean,
that's that's kind of the the inspiration behind Minecraft. Now,
there are many things that Minecraft does that infinom Minor
didn't do and was never intended to do. So I'm

(15:55):
not saying that Minecraft is a copy of infinom Minor,
but you can see where inspiration was also. I believe
something happened to infinite Minor. Oh yes it did so
E Electronic Industries. Electronics Industries launched in phinom Minor kind
of in a beta mode in the spring of two
thousand nine and after a month discontinued support. So, the
original the original goal of infinom Minor as a player

(16:19):
was that you would go down in a team. You
have a team of players, you would play against other
teams and your goal was to mind certain types of
materials and then bring those back up to the surface
and you would accumulate points. But a lot of players
I found that it was much more satisfying to mine
materials and then build stuff, not to go for this

(16:40):
whole point related game aspect, but to use it more
as a true sandbox. So that's kind of what gave
not the inspiration of well, you know this, people are
using this game in a way that it wasn't intended
to be, and the support for the game has gone away.
What if I made a game that from the start
was meant to be what people were turned ning in

(17:00):
phinom Minor into. And furthermore that you know, no one's
going to cut support off too, because I read it. Yeah,
And so you know, the the infinom Minor product kept
on going for a while because the company ended up
uh making the code completely open source so anyone could
download it, which meant that suddenly lots of people were
running in phenom Minor on their own machines and changing it.

(17:22):
But there were so many changes to infinom Minor that
it lost cohesion. It was no longer a unified platform,
so there wasn't enough there to be to have a
community to stay around it. Right it was, there's so
many different niche versions of infinom Minor that you couldn't
have a community anymore. So Minecraft took a slightly different approach,

(17:43):
and he began to develop Minecraft starting right around well,
according to according to the Minecraft site, on May tenth,
two thousand nine, that's exactly when he started to develop Minecraft.
And he decided to switch from being a full time
when developer and game developer for for this other company

(18:03):
to part time, so he scaled back his work hours.
He still was an employee with this company, but he
the other half of this time was spent developing Minecraft. Uh,
and things moved really really quickly. Yeah, the game would
release later that year in two thousand nine. Yeah, the
beta version came out. In fact, the beta version. For

(18:23):
a long time, people began to wonder if Minecraft was
a Google product because it was in beta for a
couple of years. But but the meant that people could
actually play the game he was working on, and that
you know, you could even do pre orders as early
as June nine, he had started developing on May tenth.
June thirteenth, he begins to accept pre orders for the game.

(18:45):
He releases those early builds of the game for testing
over the next two years, and he would keep on
updating them, adding in new features throughout those those two
years as he was preparing the game for its gold release.
Right as of the podcast, the game had not come
out of beta yet. Yeah, that was when we were
still wondering if it ever would come out of beta.

(19:06):
And actually it wouldn't take much longer, but before we
get to that. On June one, that was Nacha's birthday
and also the day that he quit his job, his
his day job and started devoting everything full time to Minecraft.
That's right. So June one, two thousand and ten, big day,
big day for Notch where he was ready to take
the plunge the Minecraft project, which he originally thought was

(19:30):
going to be fun but not a huge success. He hoped.
His biggest hope was that would be successful enough to
fund his next game idea, which he didn't necessarily have
at that point. He was just hoping that, well, this
this project will bring in enough money for my fun
and maybe and over six million people had downloaded it
in the first year, so that's when it was the

(19:50):
realization came with Wow, this could be the big money,
this could be the game. Well, we'll we'll move on
into the rest of the timeline in just a second,
but before we get too carried away, I want to
take a quick break to thank our sponsor. Alright, So
we left off at notches birthday on June one, when

(20:11):
he had made the big leap, cutting his uh, his
job and now focusing full time on Minecraft. Um. And
you know the next day I have is in do
you have anything else? I do? Not now? Okay, So
March second, two thousand eleven, Notch announces development for a
new game called Scrolls. Scrolls was a game that was
kind of the brainchild of both Notch and another member

(20:33):
of what would become his company, Moo Young. Um. But
it's uh, it's kind of a combination of a board
game and a card trading game, kind of like Magic
the Gathering meets war gaming. So you would have a
strategy element on where you placed things in the game
as well as kind of this card based system. Although

(20:54):
they're called scrolls within the game, which means that I
would be terrible at it, but I'm sure lots of
people enjoy it in many ways. Meanwhile, he uh not
was figuring that, you know, this was all becoming more
work than he was really willing and able to do
by himself, and so he founded a company. This this
movie Young that we've been talking about a little bit, uh,

(21:17):
that was at some point in mid and has since
then hired a team of maybe about twenty people or so. Yeah,
there's someone who's in charge of fun to work mostly
on Minecraft, honestly. Right, there are a couple of other products.
There's scrolls, and then there was one other one that
they announced, but we'll get to that because it's it's
kind of a sad story. Um. In June, our first

(21:39):
episode on Minecraft came out. Just just just to give
you give you a concept of when in the timeline.
This was in November, the first international convention for Minecraft happened.
That was in Las Vegas, and it was aligned with
the release of Minecraft officially. In fact, in twenty eleven,

(22:00):
that was a huge year from Minecraft. In August of
that year, they released a pocket edition for Experience Play,
which was it was an exclusive deal to Sony, but
the exclusivity only lasted a very short while. By October seven,
it had expired, and so on October seven, eleven, they
released the Pocket Edition of Minecraft, which is really meant
for mobile devices, is a simplified version of Minecraft that

(22:23):
you can play on mobile devices. It's currently available for
iOS and also andreft. The October seven was when it
came out on Android, and then on November seventeenth this
when it came out for iOS. And on November eight
that's when Minecraft had its official release. Keeping in mind
that people have been playing this game for two years already, uh,
they in various stages and and for a while. In fact,

(22:45):
I think you can still get Minecraft Classic for free,
which is based upon the original code for Minecraft. The
new game. The game that actually you can purchase it
varies depending upon where you are in the United States,
around twenty seven dollars or twenty six a five something
like that in the US to buy a copy on
PC um. But the Minecraft Classic one is free to download.

(23:08):
Um there they are two different games, really, And then
the Xbox version of course has its own pricing. And
while it hasn't happened yet, and I kind of wrote
this later in the timeline, but I'm gonna go ahead
and say it. Uh, the PlayStation four and the Xbox
One will both also have Minecraft on them um PlayStation four.
That will be the first time anyone on the PlayStation

(23:29):
platform who didn't have an experience could actually play this game.
So I expect the numbers will continue to explode. Um.
The game has been incredibly popular. I was really I
was at the the Microsoft press release at E three
this past year, and uh, the Xbox One press release.

(23:51):
One of the games they showed off was Minecraft. I mean,
among all of these really high graphics, crazy sound, all
of this, you know, big staff, and then Minecraft. Yeah,
and it got a huge response, just big cheer from
the audience. I'm like, never before have giant one meter
blocks looked in higher fidelity than right now in fidelity

(24:11):
and knows the wrong word I should say resolution, but
at any rate, it was. It was amusing to me
to see the the massive power of the Xbox One
compared to the Xbox six anyway, being used to do Minecraft. However,
that being said, again, the differences between the Xbox version
and the PC version are pretty vast. Like, the Xbox
version is much smaller, the individual worlds are smaller than

(24:35):
the the PC version. So for example, if you start
in your spawn area and just walk in a straight
line from where you started. Eventually you hit the end
of the world. Uh. In the Xbox version, it takes
place much more quickly than it would in the PC version,
and in fact, in the PC version, it would continue
to try and generate the world. And one of the

(24:56):
problems that the earlier builds of Minecraft had was that
if you went beyond a certain point, it ran out
of computer memory, and so you would have these big
gaps in the world, and they used to refer to
that area as the end. It's now a goal for
you to journey to the end. It's actually part of
the the end game of Minecraft, if you want to
think of it that way. And it's kind of funny

(25:17):
because it's one of those things that sort of popped
up as a result of just the limitations of the
game itself. But like I said, the Xbox version much
more limited. I expect the Xbox one the world's will
be larger. They just recently increase the size within um
uh the Xbox three six version. I noticed because I'm
currently building a tower in my quest for the Biggest Castle. Yeah.

(25:39):
Right now, I'm just building a skyscraper because my castle's
I get to a point where I burn out. So
now I'm building a a ten by ten actually I
guess it's technically eleven by eleven tower, and it's currently
I think thirteen stories tall and each story is three
meters tall. So if you want to help me build

(26:00):
my tower, look for John B. Strickland on Xbox Life
because I'm on there all the time. Guys. Anyway, Um,
so that was a big tangent. Let's get back into
the timeline. Yes, So, by the end of eleven, Notch
had stopped working on Minecraft, and in December he was
you know, I when he speaks about video games, he

(26:21):
reminds me a little bit of Sidmyer, and I mean
a because he just sounds like a really nice dude
and be he is so passionate about creating games, about
the actual developer programming part of it, and is a
little bit disinterested in in the fame side of it,
and and also in the in the hoopla part. I

(26:42):
mean I it seems like he gets very frustrated. And
he's got a really great blog on Tumbler that all
um reblogs and stuff from, even though it's like from
two years ago, it's just really great, uh you know where,
And he just he just talks about getting to this
point where he was like, I love programming, I love
of talking about programming, and I'm really disinterested in having

(27:05):
anyone give me feedback on my programming when it's at
such a basic stage, because it's it's just a total
buzz cat. There's actually I've got some great quotes from him.
Uh but yeah, like he's he said specifically to that
end that he feels the pressure to repeat the success
of Minecraft, and that the fact that Minecraft succeeded so overwhelmingly,
so saying that it went above and beyond his his

(27:28):
expectations is there's that's such an an understated way of
putting it. Because he's made a hundred million dollars from
Minecraft and Minecraft merchandizing. I mean when I first saw Minecraft,
I never would have imagined that merchandizing would be a
big deal. But it's a huge deal. Yeah, in twelve alone,
he would earn over a hundred million dollars on mine.

(27:49):
Hundred million dollars. So he has the freedom to do
whatever he wants, and that part is great. He loves
that part. The party doesn't love so much is that
because Minecraft was such a huge success, that's what people
expect from him. Now they deal in another huge success. Yeah,
they want they expect another Minecraft. So that puts an
enormous amount of pressure on him to develop something that's

(28:10):
as good as Minecraft is, whereas he wants he wants
the freedom to be able to develop whatever he likes
and not the pressure of, oh, it has to meet
these certain expectations. Because once you have those expectations there,
that puts parameters on what you can build. Because if
it's something that just interests you and you really want
to do it, but no one else really gets it,
then you just you're setting yourself up for lots of

(28:32):
criticism as people like, this is not what I wanted.
I want you to build another Minecraft that's not Minecraft.
It's just as good as Minecraft. And and you know,
for example, when you're the kind of dude who just
unto himself, creates a website that lists all of the
natural numbers in existence and then tweets about it too.
You know, your one point three million followers, maybe you know,

(28:54):
maybe you've got other stuff going on. I'm just saying,
you know, it's it's the guys. The guy's rain works
in really interesting ways. And and being beholden to an
audience about and especially a very large, very vocal audience.
I can understand his frustration. Um and and you know
so so in everything was really ramping up that year.

(29:15):
The three sixty version of Minecraft was more played than
Call of Duty Modern Warfare. Yeah, it hit Xbox Live
Arcade and then it exploded there. And there are some
great shows that are Minecraft oriented, uh Chad from this
Weekend Tech has a YouTube series about Minecraft. The Rooster
Teeth guys have let's plays and let's build set in

(29:37):
Minecraft that are entertaining and hilarious. In fact, they even
Gavin Free of Rooster Teeth created the most ridiculous thing
he created. Oh Gavin, So he created a basic structure
that was an obsidian block, and then four gold blocks.

(29:59):
He mined all this gold. And you know, when you
mind gold, you didn't have to refine it, and you
get gold bars. Then if you have enough gold bars
can make a gold block. He mined and refined all
this gold. They were they wanted the gold for another reason.
They wanted to use the gold to create circuits to
power a mine cart track. They were they were trying

(30:19):
to get an achievement in the Xbox version of the game,
where you have to travel a certain distance on a
on a rail car and then you unlock the achievement,
which meant they needed gold. But Gavin took all the
gold and made gold blocks out of it instead of
using it to actually make these power right, so he's
being a bit of a troll, which is kind of
what Gavin does. And uh, he then created the subsidium.

(30:41):
They put an obsidium block down and then uh four
gold blocks and called it the Tower of Pimps. That
is that became its name, the Tower of Pimps, and
then now has become a thing in the Rooster Teeth
games where they compete and whoever wins gets the Tower
of Pimps. That weekend. They've actually got a three D
printed version of the Tower Pimps that goes from one
person's desk to another as they battle over it. Well,

(31:05):
it turns out that the Notch must watch Rooster Teeth.
The people must watch it because um, they incorporated the
Tower of Pimps in a secret part of the tutorial
world of the Xbox three sixt version of Minecraft. If
you play the tutorial world and you know where to look,
you can find a pre built tower of pimps there. So,

(31:26):
I mean, this is this is again kind of showing
how they value that community that has grown up around
the game, where people who make something that resonates with
an audience, they acknowledge that it's not one of those
games where you put it out there and then you
just you divorce yourself entirely from it and then you
go do something else. Yeah, the company Muang was big

(31:49):
enough as they were included in this total patentroll lawsuit
along with like Electronic Arts and Square Enix um over
over paid Android usage. Yeah, some sort of it was
either in game payments or something along those lines. Yeah.
But but I mean, you know that's that's a pretty
huge sign of of you've made it. You know you've

(32:10):
made it when you get sued, when you get targeted.
I hope I never made it. Not. Also that year
was presented with a special award from the British Academy
of Film and Television Arts Video Game Segment uh in uh.
He also during this time was also working on a
new game called Zero Times Tend to the Power of
C which was supposed to be that the Zero Times

(32:33):
Tend to the Power of C was supposed to be
a coding error within the confines of this game that
causes the entire human race to go into cry genic sleep,
and when they wake up, it's eons later, and the
universe has changed as a result because so much time
has passed, and it's another it's another sandbox kind of game,
you're it's it's also very sixteen bitten blocky. Exploration was

(32:55):
a big theme, as is trading, but as of August
of this year, um it is no longer in development.
Notch said that he had uh had stopped developing the
game and did not have any aspirations for it to continue.
It's actually been taken over though, by a fan group
that calls themselves Projects trillic And, and he's basically given

(33:18):
them his blessing. Yeah, they're from what I understand, they're
trying to create essentially the game he was building, but
they're not necessarily using the code that he had developed,
so they're they're they've got the same end goal, but
they're taking their own pathway to get there. Meanwhile, UH
Minecraft kept on keeping on. In February eleven, two thousand twelve,

(33:38):
it launched on a new platform, one that we just
got access to because I think we think we have
access to this. I think this is one of the
things that's sitting on your desk, the Raspberry Pie twelve.
It came to the Raspberry Pie the Minecraft Pie addition,
and it's available for free download on the MoU Yang's blog.

(33:59):
We should fire that thing up. Yeah, I was just saying, like,
let's fire up the Raspberry Pie download that because it's
meant to be an educational tool for novice programmers. It's
actually it's not necessarily meant just for entertainment, but to
learn how to program and using that as sort of
another platform on programming. All right, Well, it's Java based,
and I've heard that actually a lot of a lot
of kids are getting into programming through Minecraft onto themselves,

(34:21):
and not only just uh programming, but also circuitry, because
you can build circuits within the world of Minecraft, and
you can even build the you know, you can think
of them as macro processors, not micro processors, because they
span entire fields within the game of Minecraft. But you
could build a working calculator in Minecraft using all the

(34:43):
basic electronic components that you can create or mine in
the game, which you know, I've seen some of the
videos of people who have done this, where you know,
you hit a switch and it creates a very simple
computer algorithm that follows very basic rules. But it's of
an equation for you or you know whatever that yeah, whatever,
whatever it's designed to do. Yeah, and piece of music

(35:06):
or yeah, yeah, I've seen those two where they set
up the various music blocks and set up the circuit
so that it plays a specific tune. It's a level
of understanding of this game that is really surprising to me.
But it also means that people are learning the basics
of electronics as well as the basics of programming, uh,
through this one game and it and it can inspire

(35:27):
people in other ways to we'll talk about that in
a second. One of the interesting things that I read,
and I know you read the same piece, it was
a there was a piece in the New Yorker about
Notch that was quite good. Yeah, that was great. I
thought I had it written down. Uh. It was written
by Simon Parkin. It was published in April. I'll see
if we can remember to link it on social. Yeah,

(35:48):
it's it's an excellent article. And in that Notch is
quoted as saying, I don't want to feel like I'm
in charge or anything. Of course, it doesn't really work
that way, because we all know I'm the founder. But
I try to have a studio where people go to
make games for the fun of it, not just because
some investor has said we have to make money. And
that kind of boils down to his basic philosophy. And

(36:08):
it's very similar to sid Meyer, this idea that I
love to build things. I love to make games. I
love to make things that are fun to play, and
that's my motivation. It's a huge games games where you
get to decide what the story is, what your motivations are. Yeah. Yeah,
these are games where there's not necessarily a pathway that
you have to follow. You can take one of a

(36:30):
billion pathways. Now, Minecraft does have kind of an endgame.
I had mentioned it before that there are three basic
worlds in in the in the original version of Minecraft.
Keep in mind there are mods out there that have
all sorts of worlds, but the three basic worlds are
the overworld, which is where you spend your time when
you first start off. Then there's a a kind of

(36:51):
Hades like region called the Nether where everything is on
fire and trying to kill you. Uh, that's only a
slight exaggeration. Uh, there are certain things that are not
on fire, and there are a couple of critters that
aren't actively trying to kill you. But there everything else
is like how I feel about our new office environment.
Yeah kind of. Yeah, well, I certainly think Robert's out
to kill me. He's already set up his his second

(37:14):
secondary monitor to block me off. I don't know if
you've noticed that. I'm sure it's not personal. No, it's
just so he has a semi cubicle through himself. Uh,
I love you, Robert anyway. So that you know, there's
the overworld, the nether and then there's the End that
I mentioned before. That's where Enderman come from. Enderman are
these kind of creepy characters that are three blocks tall.
They're the the tallest regular characters you would encounter in Minecraft. Uh.

(37:39):
They also are not aggressive unless you look at them.
If you look at them and you look above their legs,
essentially they become aggressive and we'll try to kill you.
They can also teleport, so they're tricky critters to defeat.
But if you go to the end, which is where
the Injerman supposedly come from, you can encounter the Ender Dragon.

(38:00):
The Indo Dragon is enormous and deadly and probably requires
multiple people ganging up on it at once using enchanted weapons.
These are all things that were added into Minecraft over
the course of the game. Obviously, when it first started,
you didn't have ways of enchanting items and you didn't
have dragons flying around. But if you defeat it, then
you get a little um, you get a story that

(38:23):
unfolds that's supposedly very beautiful. I have not read this
story because I have not defeated the Indo Dragon, and
I refuse to watch a video and see it for
myself until I have done it. So I'm waiting until
I get to a point where I feel like, all right,
let's give this a shot and let me get like
at least three or four other people who want to

(38:43):
throw their lives away and and take on the Indo Dragon. So, uh,
there is an end game in the game in that sense,
but you never have to play it that way if
you don't want to. There's no reason for you to
go after that goal if it doesn't interest you. Um.
And we've seen some interesting uses of Minecraft in ways
other than just as a game. Right, It's kind of

(39:06):
a semi official educational tool. It is being taught in schools. Yeah, yeah,
it's being used as a tool in various applications. So
you've got some where it's like city planning, you know,
the idea of how do you how do you lay
out a city so that it makes sense? And they
use Minecraft as the basic building blocks for that. Literally.
There are other ones where it's just teaching teamwork, where
you throw a group of students in a newly developed

(39:29):
world and say, all right, here are the basic thing
or what what basic things do you need to do
in order to survive? What? How do you prioritize those steps?
How do you delegate who does what? How do you
actually achieve your goals? And so that's another way, or
even just as a motivator. I read about it being
used in a in a in a foreign language class

(39:49):
and that you know, the student that the teachers like
find you guys can play Minecraft, but you have to
speak entirely in this language that you're learning in order
that's it's the only way you can communicate, communicate via
text or you can talk to each other, but you
have to speak and write in this other language that
you're learning UM, which is great because it turned you
into this. You know, it's an immersive environment where you

(40:11):
have to communicate in order together. So that was I
thought a very clever way of using Minecraft. Uh. There
is an organization called Teacher Gaming which runs Minecraft e
d U, which is a tool designed to help teachers
incorporate Minecraft into lesson plans. UM actually has a special
build of Minecraft where you can sign in as a

(40:31):
student or a teacher and can create specific goal oriented
tasks UM and encourage things like communication and teamwork. I've
read about a lot of gamer parents who have played
with their children are set up servers for their children
so they can play in a safe environment and um.
Another example of that is Bernie Burns of Rooster Teeth,

(40:53):
who talks about playing it with the son and then
that's in fact how he got introduced to Minecraft and uh,
and now it's a big part of what Rooster Teeth does. Yeah,
so uh. And of course he was not the only
person in the company to have played the game. Gavin
also had an unfair advantage in those early games because
he knew what was going on, whereas everybody else was like,
how do I make an axe? So the car. What

(41:16):
does Gavin do with that knowledge? He builds the Tower
of Pimps. Yeah, so, um, you know, knowledge is power people,
then with great power comes great something or other. Yeah.
That there was a frolicking motion by the way that
that I really felt got lost in. It was Lauren
doing the frolicking, but not Jonathan. I do not frolic cavort.

(41:39):
I'm not a frolicker. I'm a covorder. Um. And so
there are other interesting mods. I saw a mod where
you can build and maybe this isn't even a mod,
but I don't play the PC version, so this is
this is brand new to me. But you could build
a rocket and then actually go from the world of
Minecraft to the Moon, which I just blew my mind.

(42:02):
I was like, this is incredible, and that it also
involved a lot of the materials that occur in the
PC version but not in the Xbox version. So I
saw it. I was like, well, there's no way for
me to do this right now. I could always go
out and buy the PC version, but then that means
I have to learn. There was there's a mod that
you guys talked about in the original episode that was

(42:22):
of the Starship Enterprise. Yeah, I was a guy who
had who had gone essentially into creative mode and wanted
to make a to scale one to one version of
the enterprise like that you can get in and like
crawl around and being a Jeffreys tube and you could
you could explore the various text And this was the uh,
the n c C seventeen o one, so not the

(42:43):
not the not the later enterprises. We're talking original series
enterprise and an update on that story. Over over that enterprise,
mod Millang got hit with a season desist from Universal
Studios to to which not was Paramount Picture sexually. Uh,
I read Universal videos that I'm willing to go with

(43:04):
either UM and it would to which Notch replied, like,
it's it's like sending a letter to Adobe because someone
drew a copyrighted image and photoshop right. He's like, like,
I built the tool, but I didn't build that. Yeah.
And put Putt, which is actually a brand name of
of UM, also has sent a season desist and further misunderstanding,

(43:25):
it's the same, you know, the same sort of thing
as Safe Harbor with sites like YouTube. Right where YouTube
is offering people the platform to you can upload videos,
YouTube itself is not responsible for the material inside those videos.
It does have a responsibility to act when those videos
violate intellectual property, But how do you do that when

(43:48):
someone has just built the enterprise on a server that
they own. You know, essentially you have to serve that
to that season desists to the person that built it,
not to the company that provided the tools. But yeah,
we we've seen lots of other interesting builds besides that.
And I talked about how these mods are, uh pretty popular.

(44:09):
There are a lot of different skins that you can
get for um for Minecraft, not just for your character.
You can put give your character a different skin, some
of which are based upon other popular games. They have
Halo skins, so if you want a little blocky master chief,
you can make one. Although although Nottch did write a
really nice I I linked this on Twitter today because
I was just so impressed with it, a really nice

(44:31):
post about how Minecraft is genderless, um that that your
natural avatar. You know, at some point started being called
the Minecraft guy because he's kind of blocking and dude
ish and and that and that's yeah. Well, someone I
think someone asked not at some point, oh what's the
dude's name? And he was like Steve, and I think
that's how that one got started. Um. But but that

(44:53):
you know, all all the animals and minecraft are genderless.
They can all make little babies with any other animal
that if you get it, and babies were really new
for the Xbox three sixty not that new now, but
I remember when it uh like if you you can
make animals be receptive to the mood of love by
giving them food, and um, so you can tame them

(45:15):
sort of. You can. You can lead them into like
a fenced area and then and then fence them in
and if you feed them, they're they're like they have
little hearts appear over their head. And as long as
you have two of that kind of animal, you're good
to go. There's gonna be babies popping up soon. Um.
So yeah, there's no like, there's no fifty fifty chance
that you accidentally put two of the same gender because

(45:36):
there they're this non gender gender and and that you're
in you know, and that also your avatar is technically
non gendered. Yeah, and so so you know, skins are great,
but right well, and they also have skins that overlay
the entire world, not just your character. So you get
there's like one specifically for the Xbox three sixty where
you can uh do a mass effect texture overlay, so

(45:59):
suddenly the world looks like, you know, a mass effect world,
and all the all the structures look different, all the
materials look different. You have to relearn what everything is actually.
I're like, what is this? Oh, that's what Iron looks
like now. Um. They also have one recently added to
the three sixty that is more of a plastic look,
so it looks kind of like the actual Lego Minecraft set.

(46:21):
It's very very plastic because there are textures on those blocks,
but they're very simple textures. So you can get these
different skins that make them look totally different. And that
Those are two examples that are actually found on the
Xbox three sixty one where you can purchase them, but
there are countless user generated skins and mods out there.

(46:42):
I Uh, I'm really impressed by the community that's grown
up around Minecraft, and it's a very young community too.
This is one of those games that really resonated with
a young audience where you know, kids who have that
natural curiosity to learn how things work and to build
things and to exp barament. This was a playground for them.

(47:02):
To use that kind of that kind of inclination, and
it really encouraged people to do that. So that's one
of the reasons why I think we've seen so much
incredible innovation. Yeah, yeah, you know, I think that all
goes back to just not being an awesome dude and
and wanting people to have that experience of being able
to create and play and make up their own minds
about what the game is agreed. And so I'm always

(47:25):
curious to see if this kind of philosophy will trickle
out to other developers. I think that there are some
developers that will want to try and capitalize it based
on the fact that it was such a huge success.
So in other words, from not just perspective, they be
coming at it from the wrong wrong motivation right there,
coming at it from the motivation of what can make
us a lot of money, not what is going to

(47:47):
make a compelling gaming experience. And it's it's certainly not
that this kind of world has never been seen before
in gaming. I mean, you've you've got lots of sandbox
kind of things out there, but but yeah, you know, this,
this it just resonated. It was one of those things
that that was uh just just complex enough to be compelling,

(48:07):
but not so complex as to be infuriating, and perhaps
just at the right time when I think there was
a high level of frustration with some of these really
big names in games that were coming out with these
laborious like like kind of overwrought, kind of overdone, or
or like the eighteenth sequel to a game, whether where

(48:28):
that just didn't seem to be any kind of innovation
or nothing new. It was a it was a new
maybe like a new skin on an old game, and
maybe a couple of new gaming elements, but this was
something that was very different from everything else that was
out there. So yeah, it's uh, you know, I will
not ever make another game that will resonate as much

(48:48):
as Minecraft. I don't know. I say, we let Notch
build whatever the heck he wants to build, and whether
or not it's as successful as Minecraft, it'll probably be awesome.
It doesn't Yeah, it doesn't matter, you know. He he deserves,
I think, the opportunity to play around and and not
be badgered about what the outcome is going to be,

(49:08):
because you know, he's already made an incredible game. Let's
give the guy some space to do what he does best,
you know, so hey, Notch, if you're listening, we're with you, buddy,
all right. So that kind of wraps up this discussion
about Minecraft. I hope that fulfills all the deep driving
needs of all of our Minecraft fans out there who

(49:29):
have been begging for us to do another Minecraft episode.
I always showed them the link to the old Minecraft episode.
He said that's not enough. So um, I hope this
is enough at least for the time being. We're gonna
talk about some other topics in future episodes, but hey,
we need your help. We need your help to decide
what future topics we're gonna talk about. So you need
to write into us and tell us what you want

(49:50):
to hear about, as long as it's not Minecraft, yes,
smart Alec. And the way you do that is you
send us an email. Our address is x stuff at
Discovery dot com, or drop us a line on one
of the many social networks you can find a set,
including Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr. Our handle at all three
of those is text Stuff hs W and Lauren and

(50:13):
I will talk to you again really soon for more
on this and thousands of other topics. Does it How
Stuff works dot Com