It’s hard to believe, but we’re coming up on the 15th anniversary of Minecraft. When it first launched on May 17, 2009, it was called “Cave Game,” but it was the undeniable basis for what became and still remains a global phenomenon. Developer Mojang has produced a lovely music video to celebrate this occasion, and it’s packed with nods to Minecraft’s weird quirks that we’ve all come to know and love over the years.
The new Minecraft video features live actors and a song by Douglas Haines. It opens in an office business meeting, where a man in a suit is explaining a boring chart of some kind to employees seated around the table. A young woman with a creeper mug sighs, just as a magical man with a guitar pops out from behind the presenter. As he starts up the song, she ducks under the table and begins punching the floor, creating a perfectly square hole that leads to… well, to the world of Minecraft, envisioned in a kind of magical realism that uses the sandbox game‘s quirky rules.
There are more knowing winks to long-standing Minecraft lore than we can list here. In one shot, a man blows up a cabin using a switch connected via redstone to square blocks of TNT. The guitar player rides a pig into a paddock, where a young man is luring it with a bunch of carrots.
There’s a sign in the office building that reads “Never Dig Straight Down,” and there’s even a reference to the “water bucket clutch” – a technique of placing a bucket full of water below your feet just as you’re about to hit the ground during what would otherwise be a fatal fall. (There’s a disclaimer for this one: “Don’t do this in real life. It’s a Minecraft thing.”)
“This is the place, no need to search no more,” the song goes. “An endless world to shape, and you can make it yours.”
You can shape Minecraft even further by using some of the best Minecraft mods, or start on some of our favorite worlds with the best Minecraft seeds.
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