Minecraft

Release Date: November 18, 2011

Platform Played On: XBox 360, PC

2018 Placement: Unranked

What It Is:

It’s Minecraft. Have you been living under a rock for the last decade? Do I really need to explain this to you? Ugh, okay fine. Minecraft is an open world survival game set in a pixelated, blocky world that has been updated constantly with content over the last decade. The main goal of the game is to survive and build things, but there is a final “boss” called the Ender Dragon that is considered the finale of the game. But a player can spend years in the game without even trying to fight the Dragon and still have a good time.

The premise is simple: you collect resources (wood, stone, gold, iron, coal, etc.) to build tools for yourself which make it easier to make things like weapons and armor, which in turn make it easier to collect more resources until you’ve built yourself a nice little pixelated home. Every new world is randomly generated so you can find some wonderful vistas created by the generator as you explore. And there’s a peaceful AND creative mode for people who are more interested in the building than the survival aspect.

Why It’s Important To Me:

Minecraft has gone through many iterations in my life. I’ve been a part of several servers on both the 360 and the PC (and I think I even own it on PS4 too although I never really got into a specific world on that one). Early on me and a few online friends tried to recreate Achievement Hunter Let’s Play contests in Minecraft – that’s how I got into the game in the first place. Later I joined another server with some real life friends and we all created our own different settlements – HarveyZ made a supervillain lair while I built a house with a glass floor over a ravine, and then put a giant smiley face on top of it.

The most recent Minecraft explosion for me was at the beginning of the 2020 pandemic last year: me and my girlfriend joined a new server with friends, my roommate was talked into joining as well, and it basically became the game of the pandemic for all of us. We’ve spent a ton of time building farms and castles and exploring woodland mansions and caverns while screaming at Creepers. It’s the first game my girlfriend truly got into as a co-op experience and playing it with her has made this game very important to me. (The picture is a photo of our collection of Minecraft dogs, because we always need more dogs.)

My Strongest Memory:

Oh there’s a lot. When we were first starting in the current server, I was building a house on a mountaintop and there was a massive cavern underneath the mountain that me and a few others tried to explore. Needless to say we found a gigantic cave that enemies just poured out of, I ended up dying because the one high level person shot me with an arrow and killed me in the confusion, and then half my stuff was lost because a person that picked it up fell into lava. (They then built a giant “SORRY” at the base of the mountain so I could see it from my mountaintop chateau.) It was a fun clown fiesta of an introduction to the server.

Then there was the time me and my roommate tried to further explore said cave, got ambushed in a mine and my roommate died, so we spent a good half hour lost in the caverns trying to get him back to his stuff because he’d only been playing for a few days and didn’t have as good a grasp on exploration yet. Or the time me and my roommate were in the middle of nowhere looking for a woodland mansion, I left my PC for ten seconds to check on a noise outside our apartment door, and when I came back I had somehow drowned despite not leaving my character in water. So I had to trek all the way back across the world just to get my stuff back (the first time I tried going through the nether and failed about twenty feet from the objective – I could see it but couldn’t cross the lava pool due to mobs and ended up dying and having to start over).

There’s also the time I made a special, secret area for my girlfriend for her birthday and gave her some neat items in-game. And then there’s the time she turned the tables on me and gave me a special, secret area for Valentine’s Day and gave me some netherite. Or all the time we’ve spent together building farms and taking care of dogs and goofing around in game. It allowed us to build something constructive together while we were stuck inside for a year. Minecraft has a ton of memories now. It’s special.

Why It’s #47:

Like I said at the beginning, it’s Minecraft. If you think this isn’t one of the greatest games of all-time, you’re living in a bubble. The game is whatever you want it to be, and to me it’s an escape and a fun time to spend with friends.