Minecraft was initially coded by a single Swedish developer named Markus Persson over the course of just six days in 2009 before it became the best-selling video game in the history of the universe.

A closer look

Minecraft was initially coded by a single Swedish developer named Markus Persson over the course of just six days in 2009 before it became the best-selling video game in the history of the universe. What started as a rudimentary block-building tech demo eventually spiraled into a global phenomenon that Microsoft purchased for a staggering two and a half billion dollars in cash. Players have spent millions of hours recreating entire fantasy kingdoms, working functional computers, and to-scale replicas of the Earth inside this digital sandbox, entirely unbothered by the fact that the graphics resemble something rendered on a rusty toaster from 1994. It stands as a profound testament to the fact that you do not need a team of five hundred overworked artists rendering individual pores on a character model to make a successful game, you just need a dangerously addictive loop of digging holes and punching trees