Notch: “If someone copies your game a trillion times, you won’t have lost a single cent”
UPDATE: Notch has just got in contact, saying: “I said ‘lost a single CENT!’ Or at least I tried to say so. :D.” We’ve clarified the story accordingly. We offer our apologies.
Notch has just finished his “Fireside Chat” with Chris Hecker at GDC. It sounds cosy, but that didn’t stop the Minecraft creator taking on the thorny issue of piracy towards the end of the talk.
“If someone copies your game a trillion times, you won’t have lost a single cent,” said Notch. “Some people are using that to ruin the internet.”
Notch nets himself a BAFTA. PC Gamer offers congratulations
As reported on MCV, Notch is getting a BAFTA! The Swedish creator of Minecraft is “blown away and deeply humbled” by the news.
Notch will be picking up his BAFTA Special Award at the London ceremony on March 16. He got it for his constantly evolving block builder, Minecraft. You should probably check it out.
BAFTA Special Awards honour “those who has made a significant contribution to their sector and may not otherwise have received the recognition they deserve.” Previous winners include Tony Hart, Blue Peter, KODAK, Michael Palin, The Chuckle Brothers and The BBC. Those are all awesome things, but are they as awesome as Minecraft? Doubt it.
GDC 2012 has just kicked off. We’re live on the show floor
The Games Developers Conference has just begun in San Francisco. Devs from every corner of the industry are congregating to talk about their craft. It’s a very exciting time.
GDC is less console iteration and booth babe than E3. It’s more about quiet announcements and candid industry chatter. That said, this year’s show is already shaping up nicely, especially for us PC gamers. We have men on the ground, sniffing out scoops in real-time.
Will Valve open the Pandora’s box that is the Steam Box? What’s the mystery game that EA are due to announce on Tuesday? What will Sid Meier have to say in his keynote speech? Are Hitman Absolution’s crowds extremely good or a bit good? Read on for the highlights.
Minecraft video shows off 1.2 features using Rube Goldberg machine
YouTube user Generikb has put together this spectacular Minecraft Rube Goldberg machine to show off many of the great features added by Minecraft update 1.2. It’s one of the few videos in which dropping a cat to the ground from cloud level is spectacular and cute instead of pointlessly cruel. That is the power of Minecraft. For a closer look at those jungle biomes, check out yesterday’s official Minecraft 1.2 trailer.
Minecraft 1.2 is out, build twice as high, tame ocelots, explore jungles and craft Iron Golems
The very first thing I did in Minecraft, once I’d had a quick look around, was to build a tower as tall a possible so I could survey my surroundings and then jump off. I suspect I’m not alone. Patch 1.2 will let us build structures twice as tall before hitting the invisible ceiling of the world, which is good news for Minecraft mega builders.
For adventurers, the latest patch has plenty to get stuck into. The new jungle biome is home to wild ocelots who can be tamed and turned into cats, and tamed wolves can no have puppies, making Minecraft about 12% more adorable. If you want more NPC pets, Iron Golems can be crafted to protect villagers. They’re pretty fierce when angered, but have a softer side. According to the Minecraft wiki, “Iron Golems are able to hold roses and give them to Villagers, symbolizing the friendly relationship between the Villagers and Iron Golems.” Bless their cold, metal hearts.
The patch has improved enemy AI and has added some brand new blocks as well. Read on for the latest list of changes from the Mojang site.
Minecraft mod API to be developed by new team at Mojang
Mojang announce that they’ve hired the Minecraft community members behind Bukkit to work on their server software and “offer better official support for larger servers and server modifications.” Bukkit was a free, open source community-made server mod designed to make it easy for server admins to create and maintain heavily modded Minecraft servers. The tweaks they’ll make to Minecraft’s back end should lay the groundwork for future mod support, meaning more scope for mad mods like that one that adds a portal gun, and that glorious TNT mod, and the one that adds dinosaurs, and the millions of other Minecraft mods out there. This can only be a good thing.
Watch Notch create a Team Fortress 2 RTS live
Notch is currently busy “streaming development of something that probably never will be released at all,” which seems a shame, because it’s a lovely little Team Fortress 2 RTS. You can watch Noch magically turning numbers and letters into scenes of TF2′s eight classes fragging each other in the livestream box above. Don’t worry, “Herp Derp Herp Fortress” is only a working title for now. You can suggest some alternative names in the live chat happening alongside the stream on Notch’s Twitch TV channel.
LEGO Minecraft available to pre-order. In stores this Summer for $34.99/£34.99
LEGO Minecraft’s “Micro Worlds” are available for pre-order at Jinx.com right now. The beans have been well and truly spilled at a conference in Denmark this morning. You’ll actually get your hands on the sets in the Summer. Until then, reserve your blocks by laying down $34.99/€34.99/£29.99 on the official site. Mojang are donating 1% of the proceeds to charity.
“I played a lot with Lego bricks as a child, and that’s influenced how I made games. I prefer games with levels that are modifiable. I don’t like static levels.” said Notch, speaking at the conference today.
Each “Micro World” is cube-shaped. “Because Minecraft is cubes,” says LEGO’s Tom Courtney. Each block is represented by a 1×1 LEGO plate with a tile on top. They’re not completely square, like in the game, but each “modular vingnette” comes with its own selection of hidden resources, which is canon. Whether you’ll be able to melt down four brown blocks to construct a workbench block is yet to be confirmed. Actually, I’ll confirm it now: you can’t.
Notch calms down internet with facts. Asks it to “stop hyping”
“Let’s make Psychonauts 2 happen” said Notch a few weeks ago. Yesterday, he offered Tim Schafer 13 million to fund the anticipated sequel, before clarifying his intent. Later in the day, he posted confirmed details on his personal blog.
Even though Notch mentions he and Tim “haven’t spoken much,” he confirms the high profile pair are planning on meeting at GDC, which happens in a few weeks. He also mentions that the 13 million quoted by Tim was “three times higher” than his original estimate, but that he’s still up for fronting the cash. The Minecraft dev says he would be operating purely as an investor, saying “I wouldn’t want to have any creative input.”
Minecraft video shows lovely 3D-printed Minecraft village
A little while ago we threw a spotlight on this gorgeous model of a Minecraft village, ported from Minecraft into a CAD program, and then built with a 3D printer. Now, there’s a video. A well-placed coin shows just how tiny the model is. It’s total dimensions are just 360 x 250 x 60 mm. D’aww.
If only 3D printing wasn’t so expensive, we’d find a way to carve a model of the glorious constructions on the PC Gamer server. We could stick some cogs in it, add some tilt-shift and shoot a pretty good reconstruction of the Game of Thrones intro, only with more Nyan cats. The model above was created with the Zprinter 650.
You can find plenty more images of tiny Minecraft worlds on the post apocalyptic research institute flickr account. Here are a few more choice picks from the recently uploaded sets.
The First Moments of Minecraft
On May 17, 2009, 04:24:07 AM, Markus Persson posted an alpha version of Minecraft to the Feedback forum on TIGSource.com. The image above was the screenshot, and there was a link to launch the in-browser Java applet. “The main inspiration for this game is Infiniminer, but it’s going to move in a more Dwarf Fortress way, gameplay wise. =)”.
You’ll often find articles that tell the “oral history” of something, with direct quotes from those involved telling the story of a band’s success, or a TV show’s creation. With Minecraft, to begin with, there was just Notch and the internet. Instead of an oral history, you have a messageboard history, as the game was rapidly updated and players commented.
When Notch posted that first Minecraft link, the game was only at version 0.0.11a. It took 7 minutes and 57 seconds for someone to post the first response: “Their animations pretty crazy,” said forum user Schtee. Over the next 24 hours, 4 pages of comments were posted. Looking through the full thread, it’s remarkable how quickly the game seemed to capture player’s imaginations.
We’ve quoted some of these comments below to try to tell the story of those first few moments with the game, including the first screenshot shared by a player, where the Minecraft name came from, and two game modes that were planned but never made the cut.
We’ve upgraded our Minecraft US server. Come build with us!
You all have built some amazing things on our Minecraft server over the past year, and we’re excited to keep things going! We recently upgraded our server’s hardware and software to boost performance and allow for more simultaneous users, and we added some new plugins to keep things interesting.
Check out the video that Jpang (one of the server’s volunteer moderators) made to showcase the awesome things the community has built, and then come join us!
Server IP address: 207.210.252.12:25566
Steam group: http://steamcommunity.com/groups/PCGMCUS
Contact mdoerators: pcgmcusmods@gmail.com
Minecraft Lego gets official approval, in development now
LEGO are now in the process of developing Minecraft sets to be sold worldwide. Last month Mojang launched a pitch through the LEGO CUSOO site. Pitches that pick up more than ten thousand visitor votes are passed on to the designers and decision makers at LEGO for a closer look. Mashable mention that Minecraft Lego has now received a big fat APPROVED stamp after picking up 10k approvals in two days, a CUSOO record.
Lego say “we are now developing a concept that celebrates the best aspects of building with the LEGO system and in Minecraft and we can’t wait to show it to you — but we aren’t ready just yet.” Mojang will receive 1% of any profits gathered by the Lego sets bearing its branding, which they plan to give to charity. It’s odd to think that Lego-influenced Minecraft should inspire Lego sets. We caught up with Notch recently to see what he thought. “Yeah, it’s weird,” he said.
Notch: “It’s become hip to pay for indie games”
Are Mojang still indie developers? Since Minecraft’s inception years ago, Notch’s block builder has sold a price-tag-defeating 4,733,940 copies and been awarded 96% in our Minecraft review. An Xbox 360 port is incoming, and the touchy-feely Android/iOS ports are already available. They’re even making Minecraft LEGO.
“These days it’s become hip to pay for indie games. That’s partly down to people charging for it, like with the Humble Indie Bundle, and partly because of Steam doing awesome stuff,” Notch told PC Gamer last week.
“I don’t think [Mojang] are indie in the sense of how I used to work any more, because we have a payroll to worry about and we need to do stuff to ensure the company lasts,” he continued.
“We have other stuff which influences what we do other than trying to focus on the games. We make sure me and Jacob are only focusing on game development so the founders are still developing. But as a company, I don’t think we are indie in the sense that I used to mean it. But in the other sense of indie – as in we make games we want to play without having any external dependencies – then yeah, we’re indie.”
Minecraft jungle biome teased, “green jungle is green”
Jungles are coming to Minecraft. Lead designer, Jeb has thrown up a teaser shot on Twitter with the words “green jungle is green.” And green it is indeed, with some lovely tall canopies and vine-choked bark. “Jon (@jonkagstrom) wants to add jungle animals later, but they will not be included in today’s snapshot,” Jeb adds, filling us with hope for Minecraft monkeys.
You’ll find the full quick below. As our Tom Francis said when he first saw the picture, “that’ll burn soooo quick.”
