Minecraft is a sandbox-building independent video game written in java originally by Swedish creator Markus Notch Persson and now by his company, Mojang

Minecraft is focused on creativity and building, allowing players to build constructions out of textured cubes in a 3D world. Gameplay in its commercial release has two principal modes: Survival, which requires players to acquire resources themselves and maintain their health and hunger; and Creative, where the player has an unlimited supply of resources, the ability to fly, and no concept of health or hunger. A third gameplay mode, named Hardcore, is essentially the same as Survival, but the difficulty is locked on the hardest setting and respawning is disabled, forcing the player to delete his or her world upon death. An outdated classic versionis also availabe for free, although it is no longer being developed. Creative Minecraft resembles Classic, but with many more features.

The gameplay is heavily inspired by infiniminer by Zachtronic studios and Dwarf fortress by Bay12 games

Minecraft was released as an alpha on May 17, 2009, with a beta version on December 20, 2010. Official releases for iOS and Android have been released and the full version of the PC game was released on November 18, 2011 at Minecon2011. The Android release was temporarily exclusive to the XperiaPLAY but is now available to the rest of the Android market version of the game for the Xbox360 with Kinect support is under development by 4Jstudios, to be released as part of the Xbox Live Arcade Next promotion in May 2012. The game was officially released at MineCon on November 18, 2011. Minecraft was developed for about a week before its public release on May 17, 2009, on the TIGSource forums, where it gained a considerable level of popularity. It has been continually updated and patched since then, and while it was still in alpha release, it garnered several hundred thousand sales and received critical notice and acclaim from many reviewers. It passed a million units sold on January 12, 2011, less than a month after reaching Beta. By February 18, 2012, the game had sold more than 5 million units.

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