What year was Minecraft made?

Minecraft is one of the most famous games in the world. In fact, it is the second-most-sold game of all time, only behind Tetris. Although it has a main quest line that takes players through three sprawling in-game realms, one of the main reasons why it has been so popular is because it is highly customizable due to its sandbox nature. Hence, even after 14 years since it was first conceived, it is still played by millions.

There are many players who might not know about the early history of the game. This article aims to provide a short summary of the game's past, including how and when Mojang created Minecraft and molded it for official release.

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When was Minecraft created, and more details about the sandbox game

When was Minecraft first created?

To learn about the game's creation, we need to turn back time all the way back to 2009. On May 13, 2009, Markus Persson (famously known as Notch), a computer programmer, created the very first version of the now-legendary sandbox title. The version was called RD-131648, and there are no visual recordings of it.

Soon after this, Notch created another version named PC-131655, and there is one picture to showcase how the game looked back in the day. Due to the code being wonky, the first-ever version of the game generated extremely irregular terrain. At that time, Notch only added grass and stone blocks to the game.

Minecraft's first version was back in May of 2009 when it was only called 'Cave Game' (Image via Notch)

These blocks had the same texture as Notch's unreleased strategy game called RubyDung. Notch took inspiration from several other games like Infiniminer, Dwarf Fortress, Dungeon Keeper, and, of course, RubyDung.

Back in 2009, the game was not even called Minecraft—it was only termed 'Cave Game.' These extremely old versions are categorized as 'Pre-Classic.'

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How was Minecraft further developed and released?

After that, the game continued to evolve as Notch and his small group of developers started adding more features like terrains, the first human mob that can be summoned by pressing the 'G' button, smoother stone blocks, and even planks, saplings, water, lava, other basic mobs, and much more.

The game went through the Classic, Indev, Infdev, Alpha, and Beta phases from May 2009 to November 2011. Finally, on November 18, 2011, the game was released to the public at the first Minecon event hosted by the team of developers. In the event, Notch pulled down a physical lever that looked like the one in the game to officiate the release.

Of course, at that time, the game only had Java Edition, but this later changed when Mojang released Pocket Edition in 2016 and then Bedrock Edition in 2017.