“But I did the math on how likely it was people would ever reach it, and I decided it was far away enough that the bugs didn’t matter.” “Pretty early on, when implementing the ‘infinite’ worlds, I knew the game would start to bug out at long distances,” Persson told me. Markus Persson, the game’s creator, planned for these worlds to be infinitely large: if a player kept walking in a single direction, the game would create more of the world in front of him, like an engineer forever laying track for an advancing train.īut, at extreme distances from a player’s starting point, a glitch in the underlying mathematics causes the landscape to fracture into illogical shapes and patterns. Minecraft’s universe is procedurally generated, meaning that an algorithm places each asset-every hill, mountain, cave, river, sheep, and so on-in a unique arrangement every time a new game is loaded, so that no two players’ worlds are exactly alike. It is primarily a game about human expression: a giant, Lego-style construction set in which every object can be broken down into its constituent elements and rebuilt in the shape of a house, an airship, a skyscraper, or whatever else a player can create. In the four years since its initial release, Minecraft has become a phenomenon that is played by more than forty million people around the world, on computers, smartphones, and video-game consoles.
