What did you get for your birthday when you were ten years old? A bicycle, maybe? A video games console? Some sort of commemorative item? Ten is a special number, and if your parents were anything like ours, they told you so. Your tenth birthday present should feel special, and you should feel like you’re being celebrated for making it to such an important milestone.
What if, for your tenth birthday, someone were to get you a perfect snapshot of what you looked like the moment you were born? That’d be a fairly odd present for a human being, but it’s exactly how Microsoft and Mojang are choosing to celebrate the tenth anniversary of Minecraft. To commemorate the tenth birthday of this special game, you can now play Minecraft Classic on Poki.
Minecraft Classic is a warts-and-all recreation of Minecraft in all its 2009 pixelated glory. The game is being presented as a literal snapshot of exactly how it looked back then. This is the “Classic” release, which was named as such when it was first unveiled to the public. As such, there’s plenty of stuff you won’t get here that you’ll be able to enjoy in the current Minecraft release.
Funnily enough, the first two things you’ll probably notice are the absence of crafting and mining, the two cornerstones of Minecraft. This game had its name long before these two features were implemented, but they were always planned for the game, so their absence is a touch odd. Still, as Mojang says, this is very much a historical artefact rather than a complete game as we might see it today.
Minecraft Classic is a wonderful way to see the strange and constant allure of Minecraft and how it’s evolved over the years. If you’re looking for all the modern video game trappings of the Minecraft you know and love today – survival mode, village-building, intelligent NPCs, that sort of thing – then you won’t find it here. Instead, Minecraft Classic stands as a tribute to a bygone era.
The watchword of Minecraft Classic seems to be “relaxation”. Absolutely nothing bad can happen to you in Mojang’s 2009 opus. The worst thing you could possibly encounter here is falling too far into the earth and having to manually dig yourself out. This is time-consuming and a little frustrating, but it’s far from the sadistic Creepers who taunt players mercilessly in the full release.
You’ll probably play Minecraft Classic to escape from the pressures of life rather than to add more of them, though. This serene, quiet release removes most of the pressuring “game” elements from Minecraft, leaving something decidedly more Zen in their wake. The vast, empty world is entirely yours to do with as you please. You can shape and alter it in whatever ways you see fit.
You, that is, and a couple of friends. Minecraft Classic may be old-school, but that isn’t going to stop it getting some friends together and letting loose. There’s an ingenious little system by which you can copy a link from the game itself and paste it into your browser, allowing a friend to join in the mayhem. Minecraft’s appeal has always been multiplayer, and Classic is no slouch in this department.
Elsewhere, Minecraft Classic is business as usual. It’s still a massive field of blocky bricks and blue skies bordered by sandy beaches, verdant trees, and vast caverns beneath. You can still see rich veins of resources in Minecraft Classic’s world, but you won’t be able to actually do anything with them (there’s no mining, remember?). There’s something quite profound about this “look, but don’t touch” feeling.
That doesn’t mean you can’t influence your environment. You’ll be given 32 blocks with which to do as you please. If you have the patience and the architectural wherewithal, you can still build a mansion to shame even the most decadent aristocrat. Alternately, you can carve yourself a cave system beneath the earth itself and live as a hermit, far away from the influence of humanity.
Frankly, it’s amazing how much of Minecraft is still intact in Minecraft Classic. Those who’ve played the modern version will be astounded how much of the original game has influenced and continues to influence Minecraft as we know it today. If you don’t know how this auspicious title came to be, Minecraft Classic is the perfect way to find out. It’s still the same game you know and love, but minimal, stripped-back, unintrusive.
Mojang and Markus “Notch” Persson’s design genius shows through in Minecraft Classic. Here is a game that still feels fresh even ten years after its original release. There’s a very good reason that Minecraft went on to become the Zeitgeist-defining classic that it did, and most of that reason can be seen in Minecraft Classic. Check it out now and find out how a legend began.
