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How Minecraft Was Made
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- Published on Mar 16, 2026
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The best-selling video game in the world, Minecraft, began as the passion project of a single individual who single-handedly created much of the game's foundation. This video delves into the fascinating story of its early beginnings.
Directed by Leon Herres
Written by Erin Ganley
Actor: Joe Imbus
Images via Getty
Map source by MapTiler / OpenStreetMap Contributors via Geolayers 3
Imagine being one of those people who saw this game on the forums and watched it become the best-selling game of all time
"Dung" for "Dungeon" must be one of the most unfortunate abbreviations
Lol how?
@usersomethings Dung means feces.
@usersomethings dung meaning poop.
Exactly my thought lmao. I didn't know it was an abbreviation at first.
ohhhh i just thought he just had a poop fetish, thanks for explaining
Bro dropped the hardest Minecraft documentary
less comenting more making videos lil bro
@sirgeohdfr chop chop minecraft boy
@NeverVortexx r/suddenlyminiminuteman
1kth like
that is indeed what bro did, thank you for telling me
Mojang fought back against pay to win bullshit and fans got mad? Those fools are solely responsible for what gaming has become now
Carl is such a rare ceo. Glad he got rewarded for being a good person before a businessman
so just disregard for his tweets
@mosaicdt2 Carl is not Notch
As good a person as Persson himself. Top Notch 😉
It was amazing that cameras recorded him the whole time he made the game... and also in such filmic white space!
He had to rent an apartment in the sun, starting Mojang was a lil too expensive.
And that he wore a fedora, so stylish and ready to tip towards any ladies that come in the proximity
@LakkzYTdamn
Also, a very very small claim to history, I made the art/avatar for Miles Smith's (which you can see on his RUclips) account that is seen at 13:00. He wanted one that was similar to the Mojang team. I saw it in the video and went 'Oh shit, didn't I make that?'
And drinking 8.4 Fl Oz Red Bull instead of 250 ml
Man C418 cooked so hard. He probably had no idea how legendary that OST would end up becoming.
Street artist to Legend Artist. Best minimalism Artist ever.
Yep - definitely earned his spot up there with Graeme Norgate's soundtrack to Goldeneye on N64.
One of the best soundtracks EVER
C418 legendary status
And he is still producing nice music!
Special shout out to Carl Manneh for recognizing talent&passion in his employee and deciding to nurture it, instead of smothering it in the name of productivity!
I hope he got a decent payout
Carl is a real one
Midas didn't do it to maintain productivity. They did it because of competition. To be fair I wouldn't allow a competitor to grow in my own business.
@Imaboss8ball in my opinion you have no right to tell someone what to do in their free time.
@sino_diogenes "decent" is probably a bit of an understatement LOL
21:05 I looked away for two min and got really confused how we went from Minecraft to Bin Laden's compoind
Notch teaming up with C418 was probably the best decision in gaming history
I never knew The Order Of The Stone from Minecraft Story Mode came from Minecrafts original name.
Saaaame that blew my mind
I already knew that when I played Story Mode, so it was a very fun easter egg for me (or the right term here would be just reference?).
@xXRealXx yeah reference
"Minecraft: Story Mode" - The story of Minecraft.
As a Norwegian i can comfortably say that this is one of the very few Swedish inventions i'll publicly admit is goated
As a Swede I cannot agree
As an Englishman the Scottish will never beat the swedes, the best thing they’ve been able to make is beer
As a Finn I must admit the same (pls don’t tell anyone)
A stolen idea really
As a Dane I must admit the same (sweden sucks)
I was one of the Alpha version people, really great to have that experience and open the game up today and see the now endless possibilities.
I think the limited nature of the first versions was nice
Alpha gang assemble.
I remember playing the demo that he uploaded to the forum, then the actual release. Being excited when he added features like beds to the game.
were you in Bellevue 2010 for the illustrious park ceremonies?
U a unc
Thank God EA never got their hands on Minecraft. You would probably have had to pay for every new world you generate.
You having the dates of everything is really nostalgic for me. I remember when Minecraft launched in 2011. I was in the 7th grade and idk how but that game hit the streets like crack in the 80s .. especially for kids who were like 12-15.
Moment of respect for Carl Manneh for believing in Notch!
Anybody know what the difference in shares was between Manneh/Porser and Notch? I’m curious what they took home from that sale to Microsoft compared to the creator, like did he get 1b and they split the rest?
@CantTellYou wiki "As part of the transaction, Persson received $1.8 billion, while Porsér and Manneh got $300 million and $100 million, respectively"
@cm71817Lucky people to be in the right place at the right time.
This is a great example of "Ideas are cheap". Infiniminer was the idea, but the people, who made it didnt do a good job following through on the idea and making something great out of it.
you are completely right, but i'll just add that infiniminers creator went on to make zachtronic games, and is doing well. So maybe some ideas are just not for everyone to make stuff out of
Idea of infiniminer was different, just similar visual style and mechanics. Note that 15 years later Zach Barth is behind multiple top rated PC games: EXAPUNKS, OPUS MAGNUM, SHENZHEN I/O and others.
The idea of infiniminor was good, which is why people played it. Eventually people want to do something else, they choose to build a community.
It was a weird choice to call it "a powerful idea" when it's the follow-through that makes it real.
Every new idea has another idea that it was based on. Sometimes it's from multiple existing ideas, other times it could just be a better spin on an existing idea. New ideas do what they can with what they have, while ideas deriving from it have the advantage of seeing how it turned out. So when a new idea is very different from existing ideas, it can be hard to do it right the first time, as you don't have the advantage of hindsight.
Huge W for having such details like his Eclipse IDE, Windows version, file dates, etc. That's impressive!
They even had code from some of notch's other games on screen
not only is it using eclipse, it's using an old version of eclipse. everything about this feels so like true to detail, it is amazing.
yeah that's just stunning
Almost perfect! I did see a Windows 10 drive in one of the shots... smh /s 4:39
@erichusted Ah, Good catch.
Denmark: we have LEGO
Sweden: hold my furniture
20:30 ACTOR? I FR THOUGHT THAT WAS NOTCH
Me too
Yeah they definitely had 4K60 FPS video recording of notch back in 2009 lol
It's hard to overstate the feeling of playing those early alpha versions at that time. The idea that you could reshape a video game world in practically unlimited ways and walk through it in first person was like a whole new universe in gaming. Dig a tunnel down into the ground, build a tower and climb it, carve a straight road through the hills, these were things that were simply not done by players before. This was before there were tools or resources or mobs mind you, it was just clicking blocks into our out of existence alone that was enough to get people extremely excited about the possibilities of such a game.
It was like nothing else to get my hands on the survival multiplayer alpha and trying it out. Very buggy, but very inspiring.
I’m deeping how both of u basically made ur yt accounts when i was born😭😭😭
I still struggle to not think of birch and cedar as "those new trees"
beautifully worded torus
I've seen so many game developers build something they're genuinely proud of, but lose interest despite overwhelming support. most people just love programming, but just can't handle the pressure
Pretty much every devlog series on RUclips! I think it's more about some parts of gamedev just being hard, regardless of the support. Games always look pretty simple, but in reality it's massive amounts of hard work.
Well, the fun part is working on systems you haven't done before, or remaking ones you have with new methods. People supporting your work isn't really what keeps a programmer working, it's the designing and solving unique problems.
Yea I have to work on this myself. I am infinitely happier working on systems and prototyping new features and ideas 💡, I get bored and lethargic working on menus and just polishing in general. I have a roguelike game that is about 80 percent done for demo with features and weapons and leveling system. The last bit is adding music and building out all the menus for achievements and all that. Smh it seems like so much more tedious than actually getting the game systems working 😅. I know it's in my head 😪 it's just me so that adds to it but I just gotta push through 💪🏽
@drevoksi If you have any experinece in coding, you'd know that games (especially at the echelons of Minecraft) don't "look pretty simple" by a huge margin.
FINISHING a game is super hard. Getting like 80% of the way there is fun, with all the design and ideas, but actually doing all the tedious bits that a sellable, consumer-ready software product requires is not so much.
WTF FROM MINECRAFT TO WTF 21:30
I was a very early tester on Infiminer. Notch was a player/tester there too. There is a big chunk of the start of Minecraft that is just wrong. This alpha stage when I first ran into him, we were testing multiplayer with a distributed server idea. Basically, each player had an instance of the server running, carrying the load of what needed to be done. The idea being that the more players you had, the more load was on the server, but the more powerful the server got. At this stage, the game had two types of blocks. Those generated by the server, and those placed by a player. The worlds were available with X-Y coordinates, but no Z. This is because of how the world generation worked off a bitmap. So, players were on a single block wide world, could remove the server generated blocks and blocks they placed. but not blocks other players placed. There were problems with the distributed server load getting code injected into it, making this idea very difficult to use. Notch used what he learned testing here, and implemented it in Minecraft. This is why the XYZ coordinates in Mincraft on on their side too. Notch recruited testers from Infiminer to alpha test Minecraft as well. I was one of those testers. The alpha game I started testing felt like Infiminer with a Z axis, player owned blocks removed, and a new texture pack. Even when it went from alpha to a paid Beta, I bought it and kept playing. I still play. My son started playing when he was 2, and still plays at the age of 16.
I was a player from Cambodia. I played minecraft in 2013. This documentary brings back a long lost memory. I'm considering going back to Minecraft. Thank you
Dual monitor windows 7 setup goes hard
lol
It kinda looks like windows vista with the teal colour accent
yeah it looks cool
yeah. true legend setup 2009-2020 era.
It was my setup until they discontinuated Windows 7, I still miss it...
Greatest game of all time. Creativity truly is one of the human kind's greatest gifts.
Facts 💯
no
From the Chauvet cave to Minecraft 😅
Definitely one of the greatest games ever developed in my opinion.
Mid af game. Imagine thinking a pixelized world is creative. Level up.
5:30 *wait a minute...*
Minecraft Story mode😮
*no more creepers starts playing*
15:14 Thanks for showing the photo that my wife took of Jens and I at Minecon 2011.
It's so cool to see the old Minecraft. I joined in an early version in 2010 and I am still playing nearly every day. This is the best game to ever hit the market.
Yet there are people out there who know jackshit about it and calling it “just a kid’s game”. This game is therapeutic to kids and adults alike.
16:56 including EA (heart breifly stops)
lol
Dodged a bullet right there, lmao
Can you imagine how horrible that would've been for Minecraft? Full of microtransactions... $9.99 for a new pick, axe,etc. $49.99 for a set of armor... iron armor... diamond : $99.99. Netherite: $199.99. Oh, you want enchantments? You'll have to buy each of those separately too.
19:51 hermitcraft 🥹
Slick relaxed editing, great voiceover, and perfect minimalist acting+stage portions! The camera behind the programmers’ heads made pleasing, nicely symbolic shots of the concept of “developing a game.” Great work.
I particularly loved the reveal of C418 onboarding at 10:39, very soft and just plain cool how the music transitioned as well.
INFINIMINER. I forgot the name but that game introduced me to one of my childhood best friends. Needless to say we were introduced to Minecraft and i would spend months at a time at his place building stuff. I still remember the day creative mode was launched. We made towers and planes and… you know where this is going.
Fun fact, me and him were also amongst the very first people to play the Minecraft hunger games as well… i killed my whole team thinking they were enemies.
That escalated quickly
So did the planes 😥
So did the people inside the building (straight to ground)
Coming from Norway, it's rare for me to give Swedish inventions praise, but this one is absolutely top-tier.
5:40 The name was dropped in the main game but was later implemented in Minecraft Story Mode
That’s what I noticed as well
2:39 NGL I read it JaiBum
Me too 😂😂
Funny how this video came out a few days after Notch said he was making Minecraft 2 lol
He was joking, but that hype definitely makes this a great time to publish this video
@WowHamBoning There's nothing to really be hyped about anyways. Notch got very lucky with his simple idea that he only kind of half assedly cultivated before handing it off to more skilled people. It was a good concept, but the idea that he's got a Minecraft 2 in him is super dubious, especially compared to what already exists for Minecraft in terms of modding and all that. Extremely unlikely he's got anything terribly new to the bring to the table anymore.
He would be sued
He said he's making a successor, not a sequel. Learn to read people.
Fun Fact: Order of the Stone was actually reused in Minecraft: Story Mode for the supposed group of "Heroes" of the first 4 episodes. The game was discontinued after Season 2 due to lots of backlash, even getting removed from Netflix. People are still trying to remake it, with the most famous remake being Block By Block: The Amulet by WazzyWorks, who also goes by Wazzy.
There is never a time where I hear original Minecraft music and don't feel an overwhelming sense of nostalgia and familiar comfort
12:10 - wait a minute... I think I know that guy!
10:45 bro c418 is the best
The dual monitor is such an accurate little detail
I remember my first time playing back in December 2010, I was in 8th grade. Not sure what version it was in at that time but it was nothing like it is today. Was 13 when I first picked it up and going on 28 and still enjoy it. Timeless classic, Greatest game of all time in my personal opinion. Excellent video showing the history!
I think "the making of the Infiniminer" is what we really need to watch.
This is some serious production quality. You even got someone speaking English with a Swedish accent :)
I like the detail that you guys didn't used RGB keyboards and flashy equipment and stay true to the 2009 timeline.
Minecraft is a masterpiece. It ticks all the boxes. Survival, exploration, crafting, creativity, combat, music, and multiplayer. It’s not just the game of a year, it’s the game of the century.
Lots of games 'tick all the boxes' in terms of just having these things. Doing them all well within the same product is much harder, though. And even Minecraft doesn't really achieve this. Its combat is still pretty freaking terrible, for instance. Its survival elements have also been desperately neglected by Mojang, who seem happy to just let modders take up that end of things. Its sense of progression is also super weird and compact, making it a heavy case of people really needing to set their own goals in order to get any great longevity out of it. Definitely lots of things it could do much better, but likely never will because of how big it's become and how reliant on the young kid market they are.
@maynardburger I Just find it really fun, dont know what youre talking about
@maynardburger I agree with you. I believe js because Notch gave the game up too early. The core elements never got refined enough before Microshit took over
Agreed 🙏🏼
the section about c-418 hit me harder than a rock. i loved his music. now it rarely plays in the game anymore. i would do anything to have the old days back :(
Less is more. Something Minecraft was much rather than IS. And what most developers fail to understand.
Simplicity = Abnormal levels of success.
I didn’t know anything about my favourite game until now thanks
Cool to see how order of the stone would later be used in Minecraft story mode
I think the evergreen lesson is that in almost every scenario of an incredibly successful project or product, there's always those that walked so others could run, and the one who took it over the line was the one focused on polish and execution of existing ideas by someone else. That, and the only way to accelerate this process is to be engaged with the world around you via communities.
I remember seeing Minecraft alpha footage on Garry Newman's blog back in like 2009. Who could have imagined how big this game would eventually become.
same time from team fortress 2 by founder father robin walker, main page from team fortress website and still there. gosh what a time to be live gaming history. i wish we have time machine.
20:15 bro did not save
It saves automatically when you press escape
@DoGGy1110 Autosave doesn't always work. Sometimes it saves at every time interval but other times you lose your whole session
It’s cool that they reused the order of the stone name in Minecraft story mode.
6:31 this is The Present Past! 😃
👀
halfway through the video i started wondering why he didn't mention this person's name
What's racist or homophobic about the sentence: "It's ok to be white" ???
nobody is saying it isn't okay to be white. It invalidates the actual experiences of people of color who are attacked for just being people of color. White pride doesn't exist because it doesn't NEED to exist--nobody specifically or systematically kills or disadvantages white people, and the idea that people do is just the result of alt-right dogma. In case you were actually looking for an answer.
I never knew there was an alternative timeline where minecraft would be abandoned after ten years of development and updates by the hands of valve 😭
10:54 Thank you C418 and Notch for making my childhood
same!
No one remembers playing minecraft free edition on the web creative only. I loved it. Going on 16 years later and now I'm playing MC with my kid.
a documentary that i didn't except this channel to make. but a documentary we need
Man I remember playing a pirated beta when I was in school in 2010 and eventually bought the full game 2 years later and made a home server. My friends and I were ADDICTED to it.
This game changed my life
Yoo folli
I cant believe I found you
Minecraft Documentaries ARE STILL MASSIVE
You know what else is massive?
@StopMotioneditz NO DON'T-
@ LOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOW
TAPERRRRRRRRR
@StopMotioneditz my coc-
10:40 introduction of the absolute GOAT
Absolute Legend
THe music and sound design made me fall in love with mc
That part caught me so off guard it felt like a special guest star coming Into a show 😂 I was fanboying
@Van-HoustonMcMillion exactly! the music adds sooo much ambience to mc
19:52 MY JAW DROPPED WHEN I SAW THE LIFE SERIES
Wow, this is the most detailed Minecraft documentary there is
10:38 legendary moment of history
10:51 THE LEGEND C418
Street Artist to Legend Artist.
1:46 "(D:) Local Disk (Win10)"
Well, there goes the immersion. I still love how you used a beta version of Windows 7 just to make us feel like we're really in 2009!
Also modern Steam logo. But they even went to the point where the date is 2009
Totally unwatchable
Beta?
the order of the stone wasnt deleted it became the center of the story mode
I believed at first it was an actor, then an animation. I didn't expect a reveal of it being an actor the whole time.
9:02 Bro drinks rudbull 😂
7:39 I am currently in this same spot of my next game. I keep sitting down to add multiplayer but I end up working on controller support or some other settings because of how intimidating networking is lol.
Great dude...because of his tweets
I played beta at 2010-2011 during my early college days. The music make me go deeper into depression
3:00 - this is so important.
Yeah, what a man!
10:21 Microsoft should take notes…
My Dad started playing Minecraft about 13 years ago. I started 9 years ago. Im 16 now so I can't play Minecraft a lot but I loved playing minecraft.
Especially the old Minecraft... :(
Never forget me and my brother playing early alpha summer of 2010. And being so excited for the new updates reading notches blog posts of each update and what new things there were. Man haven’t had that much fun on Minecraft since beta ended
Not me playing minecraft on my pc in a cave watching this💀💀
18:10 isn't Beverley Hills partially on fire right now?
Legendary documentary. About blocks. *The block game.*
and textures.
What is the name of the music at 14:10 ?
3:40 the subtitle was used in story mode
Probably one or maybe even the best Minecraft video out there
I love how this video did broke down Notch's legacy
was Not expecting to see a shirtless Jeb lol 20:02
Finally a Neo upload 🙏
"Minecraft: The Order of the Stone" is a fire title!!!! 🔥
wonder where he got the large white room to work in?
honestly, this is the Best Minecraft Story Documentary on RUclips. I really appreciate it and keep a good work!
Harmful comments ?? Which one is harmful ? LoL
his tweets were bad? You go fly that plane.
I was hoping for world generation explanation...
Love how he used "The order of the stone" for minecraft story mode.
Not one of those "bad tweets" is not 100% accurate.
10:40 gave me goose bumps