Minecraft makes a resurgence

by Oriandy Reyes Dominguez

Minecraft, released in 2011 by Mojang and created by Markus Persson, is a “sandbox” video game that has been played by millions of people. It allows players to build with different kinds of blocks, combat, explore, gather and collect.

For a lot of Judge students Minecraft fell into the shadows, was forgotten about, played by few. Games such as Fortnite, Call of Duty, Grand Theft Auto V, Red Dead Redemption II, Overwatch, and others kept the gaming world busy while Minecraft was being slowly forgotten.

Recently, Minecraft has had a resurgence and come back from the dead stronger than before. More people have started playing it again, and it is considered a popular video game in the gaming industry nowadays.

Students and teachers from Judge Memorial Catholic High School were interviewed and gave their opinions on Minecraft and how it came back.

“It’s an easy way to introduce people to coding and programming early on without really having to learn syntax,” computer science teacher Ms. McKown said. “It teaches them how to problem solve, think computationally. And I think that carries over into computer science because most people pewter sciences just problem solving. decoding the syntax comes later.”

Some believe that the recent update helped the game take back its throne. They evaluate possibilities and speak from their experience playing the game. 

“The people who made Minecraft, Mojang, did not consistently update the game. It only had a few updates over lots of years, which isn’t enough to keep playing. This most recent update (1.8) brought a lot of people back because a lot of stuff was added to make the game a lot more fun,” junior Micah Wedemeyer said.

“It wasn’t played as often in the middle of its lifetime, mostly because of other games that were being played,” said Matt Ludlow, a sophomore student from Judge. “It sort of died off because more Call of Duty games were played and Youtubers changed away from Minecraft. And then after Fortnite started dying off, Minecraft came back into the light.”