Welcome to History's Not Boring by Kidopoli.com. I'm Mira! And I'm Finn! We have some incredibly exciting shout-outs today. First, a massive hello to Hugo, who is nine and lives in New Zealand. Hugo listens almost every day and asks for this exact topic. We also want to shout out Rory, who is six and lives in Montara, California. Rory listens in the car with his dad and also requested today's story. Plus, a big hello to Linden, who wrote to us through our website wondering how this game got made. And we can't forget a very, very happy birthday to Aidan in Singapore. Have a wonderful day today, Aiden. Since we had this listener request tie-in, a total Minecraft superfan, triple header, with Hugo, Rory and Linden all requesting it, we had to do it today. But wait, how many copies has it actually sold? Over 300 million copies! If every Minecraft copy sold was a real person, they would be the fourth largest country on Earth. Whoa! That is so many blocks! How did the biggest game in history even start? It all started in Stockholm, Sweden, over 15 years ago in 2009. Imagine a guy named Marcus Person. Did he work for a giant video game company with hundreds of people? Not at all. Marcus, who went by the internet nickname Notch, was just one single programmer working on a side project in his free time. Wait, one guy made the biggest game ever. Yep! On a spring weekend in May 2009, Marcus started writing the code for a little game he temporarily called Cave Game. Cave Game? That is a terrible name. I know, right? At the time, Marcus was actually playing another block building game called Infiniminer. Infiniminer? I've never heard of that one. Not many people have. It was a team game where you dig for gems, but the game's code leaked and the creator stopped working on it. Oh no, so Marcus decided to make his own version. Exactly! He wanted to combine the blocky look of Infiniminer with the open-world survival elements of another game called Dwarf Fortress. So it was like a mashup of two different ideas. Yes. He released the very first early version to the public on May 17, 2009. It was unfinished and super glitchy, and it didn't even have crafting yet. People actually played a glitchy unfinished game. They loved it! By mid-June of 2009, he started charging about $13 for early access pre-orders, but the official alpha version didn't actually launch until 2010. Did anyone actually pay for it? He thought he might sell a few copies a month, but instead, he was amazed to find he was selling an average of seven copies a day. Seven copies a day? That's almost a hundred dollars a day. Right! Soon he was selling dozens of copies a day. It was making enough money that he quit his day job to program it full-time and formed a tiny studio called Mojang. But how did anyone even find out about it if he was just one guy? Word of mouth! The game was completely open, which is called a sandbox game. Players started making YouTube videos of the insane things they were building out of these virtual one-metre cubes. What kind of things? Dirt huts? Try full-sized castles, giant pirate ships, and entire floating cities! Players were stacking blocks to build structures over a hundred metres into the sky. Whoa! That's like building a 30-story skyscraper! Exactly! Because every single block in Minecraft equals exactly one cubic metre in real life, and players realize they could use a special red block called redstone to make actual working electronics inside the game. Wait, you can build working computers inside a computer game? Yes! People literally built working 16-bit computers, calculators, and alarm clocks just out of redstone and blocks. But how big was the map? Could you walk off the edge of the world? That's the craziest part! The game uses a mathematical algorithm to generate the world as you walk. It basically creates itself endlessly. Wait, so the world just keeps going forever? Basically, if you try to walk to the edge of a Minecraft world, it would take you walking past 30 million blocks to reach the border. By 2011, the community had gotten so big that they held the first official Minecon convention in Las Vegas. Wait, a whole convention? Just for one block game? Yes! Over 4,500 people showed up. They officially released the full version 1.0 right there on stage. They added the end dimension and the ender dragon to the survival game, where you still had to hide from monsters at night. Oh no, like the zombies and skeletons. I hate when they sneak up on you. By this point, Mojang had grown from just Marcus to a small team of around a dozen people. But that's still incredibly tiny for a global video game studio. So they went from seven copies a day to millions. Notch must have been so stressed. He really was. Running a game that millions of people cared about became a massive weight on his shoulders. The pressure was just too much for him to handle. So what did he do? Did he shut the servers down? No. But in June 2014, he sent a famous tweet asking if anyone wanted to buy his share of Mojang so he could move on with his life. Did anyone reply? I bet I could have bought it with my piggy bank. You'd need a pretty big piggy bank, Finn, because a giant tech company answered the call. Microsoft. Microsoft? The people who make Xbox and Windows? The very same. On September 15th, 2014, Microsoft officially bought Mojang and Minecraft. Okay, how much did it cost? A hundred million dollars? Not a hundred million. $2.5 billion. Billion? With a B? With a B! $2.5 billion! To put that in perspective, that's enough money to buy over 10,000 normal houses. Just for a game made of virtual blocks. That is the craziest thing I have ever heard. Did Notch stay to help Microsoft run the game? Nope. He took his share of the money and left the company. He actually bought a $70 million mansion in Beverly Hills and left Minecraft in Microsoft's hands. Did Microsoft ruin the game after they bought it? Not at all. Under Microsoft, Minecraft grew even bigger. They added new biomes, new animals, and massive updates. And you said it sold 300 million copies? Yes. In October 2023, they announced they had crossed 300 million copies sold. Today, there are over 100 million active players every single month. That's more than the entire population of the United Kingdom. Haha, way more! It's even used in thousands of schools. Kids literally play Minecraft in class to learn math, history, and coding through a special education edition. Okay, I have to know. Where did the creeper come from? The green guy that explodes and ruins your house. The creeper is actually a hilarious coding mistake. Notch was trying to write the code to create a pig model for the game. A mistake? How do you accidentally make an exploding monster? He accidentally mixed up the height and the length numbers in the code. Haha, so instead of a short long pig, he got a tall, weird pig. Exactly! He ended up with a tall, strange creature with four little feet at the bottom. He thought it looked so creepy that he painted it green, made it explode, and added it to the game. Haha, that is so funny. The scariest monster in the game is just a broken pig. Are there any other weird secrets? Oh, definitely! You know the Endermen. Listen closely next time they speak. Their language is actually just English words like hi and what's up, pitched down and played backwards. No way! They're just saying hello backwards! That is so cool! Alright, Finn, time for the quiz! Are you ready? Okay, I'm ready. Bring it on. First question. What year did Notch release the very first early version of Minecraft? Next one. What was the original temporary name of Minecraft before it got its famous title? Question 3. How much money did Microsoft pay to buy Minecraft in 2014? Here's number four. What coding mistake led to the creation of the Creeper? Last question. Over how many copies of Minecraft have been sold today, making it the best selling game ever. Great job! Let's go through the answers. The answer to question one is the early version came out in 2009. For question two, the original name was Cave Game. Number three, the answer is they paid a mind-blowing $2.5 billion. Question 4. The creeper was accidentally created when Notch mixed up the height and length code for a pig. And the final answer is over 300 million copies have been sold. I still can't believe one guy making a game in his spare time ended up creating something that sold 300 million copies. It really proves that a simple idea, like just building things with blocks, can change the whole world. Haha, I'm definitely going to look at pigs differently next time I play. Me too! Hey listeners, if you loved learning the crazy story behind Minecraft, please leave us a five-star review. Yeah, give us five stars, just like a perfect set of diamond armour. Just scroll down and tap the stars. Oh, and don't forget to check out our site, kidopoly.com. We've got tons of fun learning games and activities there. And if you want to shout out on the show, or just want to say hi, email us at hello at kidopoly.com. See you next time on History's Not Boring. Bye everyone!