Minecraft was originally made as an experiment to test random generation for caves. Minecraft was inspired by Infiniminer, a game made by Zach Barth. The first version of Minecraft was released for PC players on May 17, 2009, and was called Cave Game. After going through alpha and beta versions, the full version was released on 18 November 2011. A version for Android was released on 7 October 2011, and an iOS version was released on 17 November 2011. Minecraft: Bedrock Edition has been in development since August 16, 2011, and was called Minecraft: Pocket Edition at the time. Bedrock Edition was in Alpha until November 18, 2016, when the game was fully released.

History

Originally made by Markus "Notch" Persson in the Java programming language, minecraft started being made over the span of two years, from 17 May 2009 to 18 November 2011. More than 350 million copies of the game have been sold in 2025. This makes it the best-selling video game of all time. At first, Minecraft was made only by Markus Persson. Other people started to work on it when Persson started an independent video game company called Mojang Specifications. The company was later renamed simply to Mojang. In 2012, Persson gave Jens "Jeb" Bergensten the job of being the main developer of Minecraft. In 2014, Microsoft bought Mojang for $2.5 billion USD.

Updates

For many years, Minecraft received annual major updates[107]—free to players who have purchased the game each primarily centered around a specific theme. For instance, version 1.13, the Update Aquatic, focused on ocean-related features, while version 1.16, the Nether Update, introduced significant changes to the Nether dimension. However, in late 2024, Mojang announced a shift in their update strategy; rather than releasing large updates annually, they opted for a more frequent release schedule with smaller, incremental updates, stating, "We know that you want new Minecraft content more often. The Bedrock Edition has also received regular updates