Welcome to Minecraft Top

Launching something new is always exciting, but launching something that you and your team have deep roots in is even better. Today our team is excited to launch Minecraft Top. We’ve poured our souls into every detail of this project. Our goal here at Minecraft Top is to support a fantastic game, help the communities within it grow, and allow the talents of the community to shine.

It Started with a Stumble...

Sometime back in 2009, I remember flipping through stumbleupon.com (They have since moved to mix.com), clicking the random website button over and over. Everything was interesting as usual, but then I landed on something different. A black screen loaded in, then Java started up. I was in the middle of a very basic 3D world. “What is this?” I thought. I moved my character around with the keyboard and left-clicked with my mouse. “Pop,” a hole in the ground appeared. “What?” my mind roamed. I clicked again. “Pop,” another block vanished. I spam clicked as I ran around breaking blocks. I remember thinking about how fun it was, and then I clicked the other side of the mouse. “Zoop,” a block appeared... This dumbfounded me into amazement. “Zoop, Zoop, Zoop!”. Soon I had made a small house of dirt. I had to let other people know about what I had found.

I joined a Skype call with my friend and sent over a link. “Hey Colby, check this out.” My first multiplayer experience was my friend and I telling each other how our dirt castles looked.

I guess that this was around version 0.0.10, only a few days/weeks after Notch started coding on the project. I remember bookmarking the page and heading to bed. A day or two later, I opened the link again to find version 0.0.11 loading up. It looked like the game had been updated. I wasn’t sure what the exact update was, but I remember getting a few more blocks. I think there was wood now. Of course, our houses turned into castles, and they got better and better as new blocks were added to each version.

An Island of Many

I remember there was a link to Notch’s Tumblr, where he would post new things he was working on here and there. It was around version 0.0.13 that Notch attempted multiplayer. Sadly, I could not make it when Notch announced it, but I watched the videos after. I remember many people on the server, all with their arms swinging around randomly, as that had not been implemented yet. Most people didn’t know what to build, so it was just random towers into the sky. It was pure art. Soon after that, Notch released the servers, and we could get a small server up and running. I don’t remember how we did it, but Colby enjoyed running servers, so it was pretty easy for us. We got a few friends to jump in, and we built for hours. There were all these moments of “Oh, what if you do this?”, “Oh, what about this, though?”, “Oh, this would be cool!”. It was exciting to see what your friend was building next to you and see what ideas you could borrow from them.

Daily to weekly, we got new updates on new features—water, which seemed to change how it worked every update, glass, which you could see through. Minecraft was developing into a community rather than just a game.

Supporting the Cause

Around June, Notch announced he would sell the game early, and people could buy it and get future updates for free. He even talked about expansion packs, which I guess we could call DLCs now. I remember a screenshot of cogs and gears, but nothing ever came from it. Anyway, I knew I had to buy it. I got my official copy on June 12th, 2009, for USD 14.31. Notch was charging EUR 9.95 at the time. Thinking back now, I got it for really cheap considering what it would develop into. I even bought some copies a few weeks later for some friends, as it was fun to get them into the server with us.

My First Attempt... It was Bad

As I thought about writing something like this, I realized I had to dig around and see what I could find. Some of the screenshots above are from that digging, but I remembered making a community list in the past. I loved coding and building websites, so I thought it would be a perfect chance to launch a Minecraft list site. As a result, I set out to get a domain, and I got started. Let’s say it was no Minecraft Top. I got the domain mctop.co (which seems to be still dead now) and put something together. I was not that great at coding back then, so I used some tools.

It ended up failing, but thanks to the internet not forgetting anything, you can still find mctop.co on the Wayback Machine.

What now? Well, we are back at it, now with years of experience and a smidgen of code experience. We want to build Minecraft Top into an exciting and full community. We want to help people share their joy of Minecraft with others and explore their creativity.

So, if you will let us do that, we’d be excited to have you on this journey with us. We’re here, we’re ready, and we’re excited to see what we can all do together!

~ Shylor