Minecraft news » Community Roundtable: The "Good Old Days"

A Paul Soares Jr video from June 2011, highlighting the Beta 1.7 update, with pistons

With the 1.9 update on the horizon, there has been a lot of talk about how Minecraft used to be, before this feature or that feature. Today, I thought we'd take a look at that.

More than any game I've ever played, Minecraft has seen steady updates since the moment it went public, going through numerous alpha and beta stages, and continuing with features and fixes well after the game officially went full-version, in November 2011. Along the way, with every update, there is a somewhat inevitable backlash with any new features or changes made, and it is somewhat understandable. Change can be weird sometimes, and the reasoning behind those changes isn't always obvious to anyone not intimately familiar with game design theory. More than that, for many players, Minecraft is a very personal experience. Each of us came into it at a different time, and made it our own in ways that made sense to us. Deviation from what we considered "normal and comfortable" can often be jarring.

It becomes easier with time to look at the game and say, "It used to be better back in <version of choice here>", but we are strangely selective in our memories of nearly anything in life, Minecraft being no exception. It can help to have a bit of perspective.

Basic breakdown of feature availability (click for a larger version)

The chart above is a somewhat bare-bones look at when certain major features came to be in Minecraft, and it isn't exhaustive. It nonetheless gives an interesting look back in time, when the game lacked many features many now consider core to the game. Some are obvious - beds, hunger, sprinting - while others would surprise many players who came into the game later on. There was a time when biomes, health, even crafting itself were not anywhere in sight. Even multiplayer capability didn't make an appearance until some time in Alpha, to say nothing of other staples, like redstone wiring, even the nether.

There likely aren't many players that remember this far back, but there was a time, back in 2009, when Minecraft looked like this:

Every player looks back on how the game used to be a little bit differently than anyone else. (There was a time when beds caused an uproar, believe it or not.) What, to you, was the "first" version of Minecraft? How has it improved since then? Have you gone back and played older versions, and realized that something crucial was missing?