A Love Letter to Minecraft and its Players

29 January, 2023

Where I live, it's the 17th of May 2019 which means that today is Minecraft's 10th birthday. This post is meant to express and share the deep, deep happiness and greatest memories that Minecraft has brought me over these last few years. If any original Mojang members end up reading this, I just want to say thank you so so much for making this absolute masterpiece of a video-game. I'll never forget how this game shaped my childhood and how I am today. Thank you.

I remember the first time I had ever played Minecraft. It was my friend Matthew's 8th birthday party and everyone from our class went over to his house for a swimming party. After swimming, some of the kids went to play Nerf guns or something but I went over to his computer to see what he had on his computer. As you could probably guessed, Minecraft was open and Matthew's character was AFK next to a tree. I remember taking control of the mouse and keyboard and destroying some torches he had placed. I didn't know how to place the torches back so I left the computer because I was afraid he was gonna get mad at me for breaking his torches. Shortly after, he showed me how to place torches back and how the game worked so, that same night, my dad picked me up from the party and I downloaded Minecraft on my parent's old PC. I also remember that the Minecraft website had a screwed up UI when purchasing a Minecraft account so I had to play on cracked servers for a long time, and I'm pretty sure I almost cried tears of joy when my dad was able to fill in the payment details even with the messed-up UI. Then I told my friends, who had already bought the game by now, that I finally had a premium account so we wouldn't have to play on cracked servers anymore. I don't remember the name of the first server we had played on – it was one of those barebones servers where it was a free-for-all with builds everywhere and remains of griefed buildings all over the place. The earliest server I do remember playing on was a creative plots server called Aiur. The owner was often online and my friends and I would talk to him every now and then but we just loved building together. I remember our mothers getting mad at us because we didn't want to go to bed because we would keep saying “just one more build, please”. I remember my friend Kai and I had spent hours trying to get our own server gonig, and when it finally work we jumped out of our chairs and played survival for hours. I remember that feeling of coming to school the next day and telling my friends that I had my own functioning server. One of the greatest childhood memories I have was when I got up to 10 of my classmates playing at once and we played surivval until the break of dawn – it was hectic and I loved it. The game was perfect for kids like us who had limitless imaginations and loved playing together. Everything about Minecraft gameplay-wise was perfect. It wasn't only the game itself, but people and YouTubers that played Minecraft at the time that made it so special.

By far, my favorite Minecraft YouTubers were the Yogscast – they had everything I wanted: humor, being bad at the game and a unique feeling while watching their videos, similar to what playing with a group of friends late at night feels like. They had a variety of Minecraft series that I loved to absolute pieces like Shadow of Israphel, the Jaffa Factory and their classic survival series. Every Minecraft series was unique and I would smile with joy when finding out they had uploaded another Jaffa Factory or Voltz episode. Even watching Minecraft spawned some of the most vivid memories from my childhood. For example, I remember watching an early episode of the Yogscast's original survival series on my iPad while lying down on the floor and Simon swore. My mom heard it and told me to shut it off which I promptly did, but continued to watch while she wasn't there or just watched the videos on mute. I remember when they had revealed that SipsCo the Jaffa Factory were in the same universe, which was the coolest crossover I had ever seen before the original Avengers film. So I just want to say thank you to the Yogscast and all the other Minecraft YouTubers who made this game way more special to me.

Minecraft made my childhood and blessed it with so many good times that I'll never forget. To this day, I still play it occasionally with my friends. We hop on my survival/creative server or Hypixel's server which I don't even have to time to write about how good that server and his maps are. I'm so glad that I came to Matthew's birthday party and opted out of playing Nerf to see what was going on with his computer. Minecraft was also the gateway video-game for me, so I also have to thank it for allowing me to discover the fantastic entertainment that are video-games. I gotta wrap this up because I've got an exam in a couple of hours but I just want to say: Thank you so much Mojang and everyone else who played it, for making my childhood probably the best they could've been.