How many core devs played/play Minecraft?

[Zughy]

I was wondering how many core devs actually played Minecraft, hence the question. Of course with "played" I don't mean an hour and that's it, but more like at least a few weeks - as it's not something you can explore in a day.

Enlighten me, core devs (?)

[v-rob]

Nope. I've played Minetest since (probably) 2012. I only learned of Minecraft a few years later, and at that point, why buy and play it when I was fine with Minetest? Plus, I was starting to learn modding at that point, and I gathered later that Minecraft did not have a modding API like Minetest. I don't think it has any bearing on my development, though. I don't consider Minecraft the standard for Minetest and judge from my experience in general. All the same, it makes little difference as I prefer to work with the modding API so my programming experience makes a bigger difference.

[gpcf]

not a core dev, but I also have never played Minecraft. I haven't even touched that game.

[Krock]

I once "played" Minecraft in 2012 (or so) on the Celeron D machine I had back then - together with a friend of mine. Interestingly the game was running smoothly, given the horrible computing performance.

That was for an hour at most. I did not really find joy in playing a plain world. But somehow I got back to the genre a bit later, but did not want to pay for it -> Minetest.

There was a similar topic in the old "Offtopic" forum (2015, perhaps?) but that forum went into the garbage bin.

[paramat]

I never played MC but was addicted to watching multiplayer adventure map gameplay videos by Yogscast, Guude, Vintage Beef, BdoubleO etc.
I considered buying MC but first checked what alternatives there were, especially free ones. MT got my choice due to easy modding and a huge world height.

[rubenwardy]

I've not played Minecraft, except for a brief demo version on Xbox 360.

I'm not particularly interested in Minecraft, probably feed the beast or TrainCraft is what would bring me to it - not that I've done those much in Minetest either. I'm happy modding Minetest, and playing RimWorld/Skyrim/etc

[Wuzzy]

I'm not a core dev, but this is probably still of interest, since I create MineClone 2. ;-)
SHOCKING: I also never played Minecraft. Pretty ironic, huh?

But I argue that I still have a pretty good knowledge of Minecraft's gameplay (at least up to a certain version). Why? Because the Minecraft Wiki provides really extensive information on the nitty-gritty details. It goes really into the detail, like they sometimes even write exact algorithms down, have tons of number tables, and often list a lot of “secret” internal values that players don't get to see, all that stuff. Cool stuff. Seriously, MineClone 2 would not exist if it weren't for the Minecraft Wiki. But note that MCL2 can and will probably never be a truly faithful clone, and that's not the goal. The main goal is to make a good game, so I take some creative liberties sometimes when I think a particular game design choice was weird.

I know Minecraft better in some aspects than the average Minecraft player. I say this with certainty because I've seen Let's Play videos when a player was completely confused at a certain feature and I knew better. I sometimes was screaming at the screen! XD But I am under no illusion that I know everything. I have not followed the very latest versions that deeply, though. Because I have set a specific version of Minecraft (1.11) as the “development target”.

[sfan5]

A bit late to the party but here goes:

I've played Minecraft since about Beta 1.7.3 and stopped playing it regularly at the time 1.7 came out, "recently" I've played version 1.13.
I also briefly played Minecraft: Pocket Edition when it came out, haven't touched the Win10 edition.

[u34]

i am not a dev, but i played minecraft several years ago - than i switcched to minetest because i like open source games and minetest. since 2011 i converted tronic texturepack from minecraft to minetest. i like it very much to do this. now i have a own free minetest server and it is very funny to manage such a great minetest server. keep on the good work devs out there.