Minecraft, Nostalgia, and Growing Up

The first iteration of this article was written in a hotel room on a rainy Monday, overlooking Melbourne. It went live on April 2nd, 2024 – the day of my 18th birthday. I had a lot running through my mind, including the new responsibilities and freedoms that come with being an adult.

I could bloat the word count of this article dwelling on the encroaching responsibilities of adulthood or reminiscing about the ‘end’ of my childhood. I could even lament the gum stuck to my shoe that I keep forgetting to scrape off. But I want to write about a game that sits with me: Minecraft.

Like many my age, I grew up alongside Minecraft. I first discovered it via YouTube circa ~2012 ¹. Initially through my parent’s iPad 3, and later through my own iPad 4. I remember waking up before school to watch the comedic duo of StampyLongHead and iBallisticSquid in their latest let’s plays bumbling through various adventure maps and duking it out in Hunger Games. I remember watching their individual series, such as Squid’s Sky Island Challenge or Stampy’s Lovely World.

It was a carefree time where my responsibilities were nil and time wasn’t a luxury.

Pocket Edition

I first got hands-on with the game via Minecraft Pocket Edition Lite, a cut-down version of the game designed as a demo. I played it for hours. It was limited and lacked much of anything. It had a limited block palette and an even more limited world. It wasn’t much, but it was Minecraft, and, to me at the time, that was a lot.

In 2013, I bought Pocket Edition for my iPad. I still remember being out the front of my house when my mother, whom I had been nagging to let me buy it, finally said yes.

The game was very limited at the time, but it was Minecraft. I built garish houses of diamonds and gold, laid out intricate patterns of TNT just to watch them explode, and tested just how much of a superflat world I could fill with lava.

I remember the big update when potions released and splashing them everywhere just to see the particle effects. I remember horses being added and having to consult YouTube to find out how to tame them. I recall end portal frames appearing in the creative menu and not knowing how to use them. I remember messing around with the Nether Reactor Core before the Nether was released. I remember freaking out about weird world generation thinking that Herobrine had paid me a visit.

Pocket Edition grew around me and was the version I played the most. However, I could never shake the feeling that it was inferior. It didn’t have parity with the other versions, I couldn’t play on the big name servers, and touchscreen simply isn’t a great input method. Playing it made me feel like a second-class citizen. Everyone else played the bigger, better versions, and for the longest time, I only got to experience them through trips to friends’ houses and YouTube.

Sure, the game did evolve with updates and some simple servers eventually launched, but it was largely inferior to the other versions even after trying to improve the experience with things like Plug for Minecraft PE.

Our household computers were aging and barely equipped to run Windows, let alone the Java Edition, but my family owned a few consoles, and it wasn’t with the Pocket or Java Editions that I had originally fallen in love with the game anyway. My journey truly began with the versions featured in the YouTube videos I avidly watched: the Legacy Console Editions, starting with the Xbox 360 Edition.

Legacy Console Editions

In 2012, 4J Studios released Minecraft: Xbox 360 Edition. 4J didn’t just settle with a direct port of the game. They went further. They improved it. They crafted an experience that did more than just mimicking the flagship Java edition by improving upon it with quality of life improvements and changes that adapted it to the controller experience.

The first thing that appears in my mind when I think of the Legacy Console Editions of Minecraft (or Minecraft as a whole for that matter) is the tutorial world. The tutorial world served as a way to introduce the player to the mechanics of the game. Something no other version does. It was beautifully crafted and let the player explore and learn at their own pace.

The tutorial world Minecraft expanded alongside the game itself, evolving gradually over the years to become more extensive and immersive. Redesigned multiple times, it even included nods to the community, such as snippets of Stampy’s Lovely World.

There were also many smaller alterations, such as minecarts moving at twice their Java Edition speed, leading to them being far more practical. Plus, an exclusive song titled ‘Dog’ playing following the completion of the ‘Cat’ music disc.

They also completely redesigned the user interface for controller. I find myself blindly fumbling through the UI of the modern Bedrock Edition, but can smoothly glide through Legacy Console’s UI with ease. The crafting UI specifically is one of the best controller oriented user experiences I’ve ever had, although the option to use the standard crafting grid from the desktop experience was left available for players who preferred it.

Legacy Console also featured an excellent set of customisation options for superflat worlds. You could choose the blocks layer by layer and specify exactly what structures should generate. The customisation was so excellent that it spawned countless challenges. Even now, years later, no other edition has superflat customisation to this level.

Another thing that speaks to 4J’s commitment is their implementation of the minigame modes. Exclusive to the Legacy Console Editions are Battle, Tumble, and Glide. Battle is Hunger Games, Tumble is spleef, and Glide is an Elytra race. Each of these modes were well fleshed out and polished with a custom UI. The lobby for the mini games was also intricate and played host to a range of Easter eggs.

The game was also optimised to an impressive degree. Looking back, it’s easy to forget just how limited the seventh generation of consoles were. The Xbox 360 had a meagre 512 MB of RAM. Yes, there were limitations. There was a cap on mobs, and the worlds weren’t infinite, but most of what defined Minecraft was there, and the limitations were more than made up for by the numerous tweaks 4J introduced.

While the legacy editions were remarkable, they’re nothing without the experiences I associate with them. I’ve got excellent memories of going round to my friend’s house and fighting him head to head in the various minigame modes on his PS3. I also cherish playing worlds built by my cousin.

Some of his most memorable included a labyrinthine adventure map infested with spiders and an excellent PvP tower defence map. The latter comprised of a set of two castles built entirely out of gold blocks, suspended high over lava with only a precarious bridge connecting them. Both castles were adorned with chests full of enchanted weaponry and TNT cannons prone to self-destruction.

Yet over time, I found myself playing with others less and less. Minecraft fell out of favour, and other games grew in relevance. I stopped watching many of my favourite Minecraft creators. They stopped uploading. I drifted apart from the game. Time moved on. I moved on. I grew up.

The Legacy Console editions are all unsupported now. The PS3 and Vita Editions were the last to go, with both receiving a last update on April 15, 2020. The 360 Edition got its last update on April 30, 2019 with TU75.

Growing Up

Eventually, I bought the Java Edition. I joined the big servers and played with friends, but the spark wasn’t there. Big servers felt corporate and bland, and multiplayer servers with friends failed to evoke the emotion I associate with the game. I attempted to start a single-player world but found myself abandoning worlds after just a few days.

I loved Minecraft then, and I love it now. Putting on C418’s soundtrack evokes a unique sense of melancholy that nothing else can rival. Occasionally, I still find myself watching the old YouTube videos that first pulled me into the game, just for that hit of nostalgia.

I realise now that I wasn’t merely playing a game and manipulating pixels on a screen; I was forging memories – memories that, years later, I still hold dear.

Two quotes come to mind thinking about the game:

“Don’t cry because it’s over. Smile because it happened.”
- Dr Seuss

“How lucky I am to have something that makes saying goodbye so hard.”
- A A Milne

Thank you.

Footnotes

1. This year is an approximation thanks to how long ago it was and my lack of personal logging during that period. It is also entirely possible I was exposed to Minecraft via alternate means prior to discovering it on YouTube, but I have no memory of that. ↩