When Minecraft was first released, I was immediately hooked. As a high schooler in the early aughts with an overabundance of free time, I couldn’t get enough of traversing, battling, and building through these randomly generated worlds. But only one year before I would enjoy this world in 2010 — full of Nether Portals and slippery ice blocks — Mojang’s block adventure was a slightly buggy, frill-free,, but completely addicting beta, trying to refine itself It was simpler and lacked several quality-of-life features, but even in those early days, it was magical.
