Markus who goes by the nickname “Notch” has been gradually expanding upon Minecraft’s feature set with weekly updates (also called “Secret Friday Updates”) and now monthly additions which are similar in scope to Valve’s process on supporting their games.

This has proved to be successful for Notch as he’s made over 2 million dollars with an indie game that’s still in “alpha”.

Addiction & Creepers

What makes Minecraft so addicting is the unique ability to shape the world around you as you acquire materials (via spelunking caves) and craft new items, like shovels, swords and mine-carts. The world itself (comprised of hills, valleys, biomes, unexplored cave systems and water mass) is procedurally generated on-the-fly which means no two worlds are alike.

When you start fresh you literally have nothing to your name and must quickly gather materials and survive the night. When the sun sets and the moon rises various creature mobs spawn around you, like zombies, spiders and creepers and their one goal is that your impending death is met by slashing, gnashing or flung arrows.

Particularly nasty are creepers which are these green-spotted creatures that sidle up to you and with a hiss explode on contact, blasting a hole in the world and sometimes taking your life. These guys spawn during the day so you have to be extra careful and turn the awareness meter up a notch to avoid their ninja movements.

Shelter from the Black of Night

There are plenty on Youtube videos of Minecraft demonstrations and tutorials but my favorite by far is a series called X’s Adventures in Minecraft. In this introductory video he’s just installed the game and captures his impressions and experiences in a very organic and yet captivating manner. Just watch.

Multiplayer

Alongside the single-player mode there’s also a multiplayer component (“SMP”) or survivor multi-player where you can join a server via IP address and build castles, cottages or giant statues of 8-bit characters with other players but it’s somewhat limited at the moment. There’s no creature mobs to deal with or player-vs-player combat but that’s promised with a future update.

Looking Ahead

With the money that Notch has received from sales (thanks in part to free press by Penny Arcade, Valve and other high profile companies) a company has been formed, officially. Notch has hired 5 other people (artists, business partners and programmers) to help him with Minecraft and other ventures.

For now Markus continues to be the sole developer of Minecraft and is releasing updates, like the recent ““Boo” update which added inter-dimensional portals, pumpkins and biomes (different geographical regions like deserts, rain-forests, jungles, etc.) but also dealing with a hot/cold fan-base that can be demanding when it comes to how often the game is updated, bugs and feature-creep.

Even though the game is in the Alpha stage of development, which means it’s still buggy but stable, the plan is to have a complete survivor multiplayer mode at which point Minecraft will enter its beta phase and Mojang will start charging 50% more than they do now.

What are you waiting for? Go get Minecraft.

Lucasarts & Quantum Link

Lucasarts (then called Lucasfilm Games) was founded by Peter Langston, a musician/game designer who hand-picked a group of young and eager game designers to create original game properties.

In 1985 Lucasarts was working on a Commodore 64 virtual community game (coupled with a 300-baud modem attachment) called Habitat.

In the game you were to create an “avatar” (yes, they coined the term in this context), picking from a selection of colors and clothes using the “GET” and “PUT” commands and then chat and interact with other people within a somewhat graphical UI.

They partnered with a company called Quantum Link to provide the on-line service component and distributed a beta test. However, the game itself proved to be too popular and their servers couldn’t handle the load, so it was canceled never making it to retail.

Meanwhile the technology was sold to Fijitsu in 1989 and was later renamed Club Caribe.

Postmortem

Lucasarts went on to create many original gaming properties (successful adventure games like Maniac Mansion, Grim Fandango and Day of the Tentacle) and Quantum Link eventually changed their name to America Online.

The rest is history.

Additional reading:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habitat_(video_game)
http://www.nationmaster.com/encyclopedia/Quantum-Link
http://www.nationmaster.com/encyclopedia/Habitat-(video-game) 

Elementary Schools and Teachers

Ever since I accepted a position working as a cleaner (janitor, custodian, slop mop guy) at an elementary school I’ve gained a new perspective and greater appreciation in regards to everything that occurs behind the scenes.

Prior to working at an elementary school, I had a very one-dimensional view of how schools actually ran, seeing as though my last encounter with a peewee educational fortress was many years ago.

Yet, when you pull back the curtain and realize that teachers have flaws, library shelves do in fact get dusty and there’s a bittersweet human element to it all that’s hard to describe, only then do you realize why schools continuosly run themselves.

All of this boils down to the teachers themselves, who in turn are modivated by their student’s achievements, which fuels their inner passion to educate, looking past the spitballs and dirty looks, knowing full well at the other end there will be a result.

On that note, since we live in the era of Google, I was thinking how much smarter a teacher can seem if he or she has access to a computer in their room. With Wikipedia and Google at their fingertips, said teacher can instantaneously look up unlimited subject matter, print or project, and contribute endless amounts of information to the education process.

It’s really fascinating, considering when I was younger all we had is an Apple II and maybe, depending on if you were good or not, Oregon Trail with buffalo shooting action all at a grueling pace.

Wii!

For weeks on end I’ve been thinking about Nintendo’s recently unvieled and renamed console, Wii. I’ll admit that at first I was a bit taken back by the name (shocked even), seeing as though the console and it’s premise sounds kind of silly.

However, after thinking about it some I’ve grown to actually love “Wii” and all it has to offer. Especially after seeing the slew of E3 demos that have popped up on sites like YouTube and Gamespot.

There’s just no denying the fact that you’re no longer just playing, but participating in a game using their Wii-mote, which looks like your average TV remote but recognizes 3D space and movement. How cool is that? Way cool!

Spore

With sites like Total Spore appearing out of thin air, there’s something intriguing and undeniably mouth watering about Will Wright’s newest sim creation, Spore, that has the media and blogosphere and maybe your neighbors in a gaming frenzy.

Spore isn’t just going to change the way people look at simulation games, it’s going to turn the gaming realm upside down. From the previews to demo footage and demonstrations given by Wright himself, it appears to be a mish mash of evolution, creation, old school gaming, clay modeling, strategy and sci-fi (amongst other things) all rolled into one.

I haven’t been this excited about a video game in years, not since I first laid eyes on Simcity and Populous. 

Pixel art, now a full-blown art scene and experience depending on who you ask, was something I became familiar with in the early-80s (post Pong era) while playing video games in the arcade and on the Atari, where I clocked in several hours playing Frogger and Dig Dug. At the time it seemed a bit surreal that just a handful of green-colored dots represented Frogger.

Toss in a limited color palette and you (as Frogger) were faced with all kinds of enemies including speeding cars, hunger-surpressed gators and logs a plenty. Now it seems quite primative and even then it did as well, but still, it’s nothing less than admirable to think that we’ve (and by we, I mean those who enjoy gaming as a pasttime) been staring at colored squares for years on end.

In later years pixel art became more detailed and at times, depending on the game, there were sequences where I would be blown away at how beautiful the onscreen artwork looked. Games that stood out in my mind, even to this day, were the Castlevania, Contra and Super Mario series on the Super Nintendo as well as Another World and Flashback.

I’m sure there were others, but those games in particular inspired me to create my own pixel art after picking up a copy of the now defunct Klik and Play by Maxis (eventually resold to Clickteam), which I believe has since been rolled into other software packages after being acquired by another company years later.

According to the packaging, Klik and Play was the “ultimate game creation software for the PC” and allowed anyone, so long as you were willing to accept the rather steep learning curve, to create your very own 16-bit games with the aide of simple programming and pixel art.

Honestly, I paid less attention to the game creation aspects and instead focused on creating beautiful pixel art. Within a few moments of experimenting I realized that it wasn’t as easy as I had initially thought. Despite what I had convinced myself prior, this wasn’t the same as picking up a brush, dipping it in paint and spreading it across a canvas.

On the contrary, creating pixel art takes a great deal of patience and an understanding that whatever you’ve set out to create digitally is only a few hundred (thousand, million) pixels away. Yet, you need not let that deter you because once you’ve reached that goal and are able to look at something that’s complete, it’s a feeling like you’ve just been climbing Mt. Vesuvius and finally reached the peak.