VIDEO GAMES

Minecraft builds on success Game becomes most played game after 10-year anniversary

Kristen Rummel rummekri000@hsestudents.org

In recent months, Minecraft has been gaining popularity again. People have been experiencing what the game has to off er, from new animals, armor and abilities ten years after its release. Fortnite, however, has been on a decline for months and has yet to see such a recover. According to Ranker, 51% of 139,000 voters agreed that Minecraft is the best and most popular game out right now. Minecraft was voted fi rst for the most popular game, then Grand Theft Auto Five in second, placing Fortnite in third. Minecraft was originally created by Swedish programmer Markus Persson in 2009, commonly known as “Notch,” and later developed and published by the Swedish company Mojang. The building aspect of Minecraft allows players to build out of textured cubes in a 3D randomly generated world. It is set in infi nitely-generated world of wide open terrain containing icy mountains, swampy bayous and more. The game contains items unfamiliar to this world like Ender Pearls and monsters that the player will experience through the game, as well as real world items such as wheat and carrots. With Minecraft being a sandbox game, the game will never end until the player is done playing it. A sandbox game is a style of game in which minimal character limitations are placed on the gamer, allowing the gamer to roam and change a virtual world at their own volition. The player is put into a block world untouched by any other person and are to survive and kill the Ender Dragon in another dimension called the end. “I have played both Minecraft and Fortnite and I believe that Minecraft is the better game because you can do whatever you want and mess around with the game more than Fortnite,” senior Rich Hutchinson said. Fortnite is a free-to-play online co-op survival game developed by Epic Games and People Can Fly in 2017, who also published the game. Fortnite Battle Royale is based on the battle royale game genre, was released September 2017. Fortnite is a battle royale game, so 100 players will be going against each other to try and get the victory royale. Players will start out jumping out of an aircraft and you scavenge for resources on the map. The players fi ght each other to the death until one person remains. “Minecraft allows for more possibilities,” junior Quinn Lowry said. “You can turn it into whatever game you want to play, Fortnite is fun, but there is no way it is able to be as widespread with the content it off ers,” The games both update very often with new items and challenges to the game. The last update to Fortnite was on August 27 and for Minecraft, it was on April 23 according to PCGamer. “I think everyone should play,” sophomore Mason Funderburg said. “Its kind of annoying that it’s coming back because there have been people like me who have been playing the game [Minecraft] the whole time.” With more people joining Minecraft because of gaining popularity and promotion of the game by Swedish YouTuber Pewdiepie, it has made gaming with other people easier. “I mostly play with my friend Riley Cristat. Pretty much all of my friends have played it [Minecraft] or play it, but I would defi nitely recommend it to anyone who hasn’t played it,” Lowry said.