An unfinished game goes on sale and keeps growing
Markus Persson published the earliest public versions of Minecraft on May 17, 2009 and went on selling and updating it while it was still being built. Players spread it themselves, largely through video.
First public release; development continued in the open for years
Entry 125 of 164 in the record
What happened
The idea was simple enough to explain in a sentence: a world made of cubes that can be dug out and stacked back up. Everything interesting followed from that. Players built shelters because the nights were dangerous, then built houses because they could, then built castles, cities, working machinery and recreations of real places. Nobody set them a goal. The game supplied materials and rules and left the purpose to whoever was holding the controls.
Selling it before it was finished was the other innovation, and it was mostly pragmatic. A single developer needed income to keep working, so early buyers paid a reduced price and received every update afterward. Money arrived steadily, funding a studio and eventually a large one. Players who had paid felt invested in the direction of the work, and the running conversation between developer and audience became part of how the game was made.
Growth came almost entirely without advertising. People posted videos of what they had built, and other people watched, bought the game and built something else. That loop, in which the audience is also the marketing, defined how a great many games found players over the following decade. The game itself went on to consoles, phones and classrooms, and it remains one of the most widely played games in the medium's history.
The world at the time
Games were still expected to arrive finished, reviewed and boxed, or at least finished and downloadable. Video sharing sites had matured enough for anyone to post recordings of play, and a culture of watching games was forming with no commercial structure around it yet. Independent development was newly viable but still assumed a completed product.
Historical significance
Paid early access moved from an oddity to an accepted way of funding development, and open-ended construction became a genre of its own. The game also demonstrated that video sharing had replaced advertising as the most powerful way for a game to find an audience.
What it changed
Storefronts built formal early access programs, and unfinished releases became routine, with all the disappointments that implies. Minecraft itself was declared complete two years later and kept expanding regardless. Its use in schools, its enormous presence on video platforms and its eventual sale to a major technology company all followed from these first public versions.
Sources consulted
- Minecraft: The Unlikely Tale of Markus 'Notch' Persson and the Game That Changed Everything
- Reporting archive on Minecraft and early access
- World Video Game Hall of Fame inductee records
Listed sources support the facts in this entry. Wording throughout is original to this archive. Read more about how entries are researched in sources and methodology.
Last reviewed September 2, 2026. Report a correction