Minecraft is no doubt one of the most popular games in today’s time. But, the journey of Minecraft is nothing less than a roller coaster ride!

First released in 2009 as a hobby project, the game got so much love by the gaming community that in 2020 it has more than 126 million monthly active users.

In this blog, I am going to share how Minecraft started off as a part-time hobby project and went on to become the best selling video game of all time with over 200M copies sold!

The Ideation and Early Development

Markus Persson, the creator of Minecraft, was a full time game developer at a reputed gaming studios in March 2019. That was the time he was working on different games and started to give shape to his own game idea.

Arguably, Minecraft is quite a lot inspired from a game called Infiminer back in the days. Markus loved the idea of making an infinite sandbox where the gamers could do whatever they wanted. Infiminer was somewhat like that and Markus adapted the blocky design from there only.

The best thing Markus did was to add a Role Playing features in the game making it stand out of the crowd.

In May 2009, he completed the basic version of the game and shared it on forums for gamers. Markus used to sell the game for a mere 10 euros to forum members who were interested in playing his game.

For more than a year, Markus continued the development of the game on his own while he kept working in different game studios as a full time developer.

Setting up Mojang and Final Launch

With money he earned from the game and his day job, Markus set up Mojang Studios in 2010 with some of his colleagues from the company he used to work at.

The game started to pick up with gamers publicising it word to mouth, and by January 2011, Minecraft was able to touch 1 Million sales mark while the game was still in the beta versions.

It took another 11 months for Markus to take the game out of the beta stage. In November 2011, Mojang finally released the full version of Minecraft for the public.

Afterwards, Mojang hired the best of the best developers and expanded the team. It was the time when Markus realised Minecraft is going to write golden history!

The users were enjoying the game to the extent that they started their own servers to play in the multiplayer mode.

Some of these servers went on to become so popular that they became their own entity in themselves. Kohi servers were one of them. It even created tools like CPS Test for Minecraft players to practice their skills.

Unfortunately, Kohi got shut but other servers such as Hypixel, Mineplex are popular even today!

The Success

In 2013, the game crossed 10 million sales which was a record-breaking number for an indie game which started just as a hobby project.

It brang Minecraft into the limelight and the industry biggies started showing interest in the game.

With continuously increasing numbers and revenues, in 2014, Microsoft announced that it is going to buy Minecraft for a whopping sum of $2.5 Billion.

This deal landed Markus in the list of Forbes World Billionaires. But, soon after the deal, Markus was ousted from the organisation over a controversial statement and the full creative control went to Microsoft.

Fortunately, it did not affect the game much and Microsoft created other exciting versions of the game like the Bedrock Edition, Minecraft Dungeons etc.

In 2019, Minecraft became the best selling video game of all time with over 175 million copies sold since its release.

The Present and Future

Today, Microsoft has turned Minecraft into a successful franchise which has its own official merchandise, toys etc.

In fact, Microsoft started an yearly community event called MineFest for all the gamers to get together and enjoy. It turned out to be such an amazing idea that proud minecraft players wait for the festival each year to participate in it.

Microsoft has also released an AR version of the game called Minecraft Earth that is being seen as the next big thing for Minecraft.

There is no doubt Minecraft is going to stride on this success journey for many more years and it will be quite difficult for any other game to achieve what Minecraft has done!