So the recent-(ish) Minecraft movie announcement trailer along with an old chart of freeware indie games got me nostalgic for early Minecraft, and as much as I hate the cultural phenomenon it spawned, it got me thinking: Minecraft was basically an end of an era for indie gaming.

For one, it is the last major indie game to be written in Java. In fact, it's probably what got people to stop writing games in that language because it clearly showed how unoptimized its GC is for video games, especially 3D games. It also represents an era where indie developers still made their games "from scratch" instead of using an engine, and even though there are still developers who write games without engines, I feel like that practice became less prevalent when Unity became really popular.

But what truly makes it feel like an end of an era is that Minecraft was never on Steam, Origin, Desura, GOG, or Itch. It was always officially hosted on their own website which you almost never see anymore, outside of FOSS games. And their old website is a great example on how you can still have a simple, yet professional looking website.

I could go on and talk about how it was pre-culture war and that you can just make games without getting into any id-pol related drama, but I feel like that's pretty obvious. I really wish we could go back to this era.