A few days ago, I was tidying my home office – which more closely resembles a video game arcade recently hit by a tornado – when I found a long-lost piece of technology in the bottom drawer of my filing cabinet. It was an old Xbox 360, the Elite model – black, heavy, ungainly, impossibly retro. Out of curiosity, I hauled it out, found a controller and power cable and switched it on. I knew immediately what I wanted to look for, but I was also apprehensive: I didn’t know how I’d feel if Minecraft was still there – or worse, if it wasn’t. Minecraft, you see, is more than just a game for me. I thought about just putting the console back where I found it. But as this month sees the 15th anniversary of the game’s original release, I felt I had to go on.
In 2012, Microsoft held a big Xbox Games Showcase event at a cavernous venue in San Francisco. The company was showing all the biggest titles of the era – Forza, Gears of War, Halo – but in one quiet corner sat a couple of demo units showing off the as yet unreleased Xbox version of Minecraft. I already knew about the game, of course – designed by Swedish studio Mojang, it was an open-world creative adventure, allowing players to explore vast, procedurally generated worlds, collect resources and build whatever they wanted. It was already attracting millions of players on PC. But I had never really given it much time; so I sat down to have a quick go … and ended up staying for an hour. There was something in it that was holding me there, despite all the other games on offer. That something was Zac.
