By: Jacob Anderson
OwlFeed Journalist

Now, I know what you’re gonna say. “You play Minecraft? That game sucks!” or “Minecraft isn’t a good game.” Before I begin, I’d like to say one thing: Minecraft may not be for everyone, but it makes me happy.

Minecraft, for everyone who doesn’t know, is an open-world sandbox game launched in 2009. It was created by Mojang, later acquired by Microsoft.

The game can be played one of two ways; Creative mode, where you have an infinite number of items to use as you please, and Survival, which makes you collect these items and materials, as well as make a conscious effort to set yourself up before the monsters come out.

Fun fact: Minecraft’s oldest anarchy server, named 2b2t, is still running and played on today!

This game was a large part of my childhood, so whenever I open the game, I get a rush of nostalgia and remember what it was like: playing the game at midnight with my friends, and building huge structures and fighting monsters.

I still remember the first time I ever played the game. My siblings and I (I had 2 at the time) got our dad to drive us to GameStop, we picked up a copy and spent the next few hours failing miserably at playing, due to not knowing the game mechanics.

By around 2015, a younger audience began to discover the game, leading to its “death”, as all the original players stopped playing, leaving it open to younger people.

When Fortnite Battle Royale was released in September 2017, most people stopped playing Minecraft altogether, and the game was more or less forgotten.

Late last year, Mojang and Microsoft released Minecraft: Bedrock Edition, a port of the game that supports cross-platform playability. This system allowed people that were previously not able to play with each other due to console limitations to connect and build friendships.

With this new version, as well as the slow decline of the Fortnite popularity, Minecraft became a popular game once again. Original players logged on again and came back to their creations that had been left dormant since they stopped playing.

This influx of popularity for Minecraft has stayed until today, where it continues to provide both younger and older alike with a game they can play together.

As YouTuber Jshlatt said in his video “A Tribute To Minecraft,” “Minecraft, the game, is changing. Minecraft’s audience changed a long time ago. The only thing that’s really stayed static about it has been the music. You can put me in some random world I’ve never explored. You can add weird new items I’ll never know how to use. But to me, it’s not really Minecraft until that music starts fading in, and I’m pulled back into a world when nothing really mattered, when everything was easy, and when, well, when I was happy.”

Ever since I first played Minecraft, it’s held a special place in my life. Be it starting a brand new world, a blank canvas for limitless imagination, or just going back to a world I haven’t played in a long time, Minecraft has been there for me. It brought me new friends, and even though I haven’t talked to or played with some of them for years now, the times I did have with them was fun.

Minecraft, as a concept, is blissfully simple. But the amount of creativity and imagination this game brings, as well as the communities it creates, shows just how far something can go.