Video games come and go, but a few often create huge fanbases and have a rich, detailed history. As a game released about a decade ago and is still thriving, Minecraft happens to be one of them.

However, Minecraft was never created to make huge sales figures or even be a hit. The game was simply a passion project for Swedish programmer Markus ‘Notch’ Persson. All Persson wanted to do was create a small indie title inspired by some of his personal favourites. 

In this article, we’re taking a look at Minecraft’s first-ever name, the tagline, and the history that made this game into what it is today.

Also read: How to get Mushroom blocks in Minecraft?

Minecraft’s first name

Notch started with his passion project game development spree in the mid-2000s. The only problem was he didn’t know what the game would look like, so he turned to his beloved childhood toys for inspiration — LEGOs. 

Two more games added inspiration to Minecraft’s development — Dwarf Fortress and Roller Coaster Tycoon. The ability to quickly and easily build massive structures in these games was what left Notch start struck. 

Finally, there’s one more game that forms the basis of Minecraft, Infiniminer. Minecraft started as an Infiniminer clone, thanks to the latter’s source code leaking online within a month of the game’s release. While this meant that there were hundreds of clones going around at the time, Notch’s Minecraft stood out because of the additional changes he made, which turned Minecraft into what it is today. 

Minecraft was named ‘Cave Game’ in its early development stages, a relatively simple title that didn’t stick around for long.

Since the game didn’t even have caves when it first came out in 2011, Notch decided to combine the two core gameplay mechanics to come up with the name Minecraft. 

For a very short time, the game also had a tagline called “Order of the Stone”. This was scrapped soon as well. However, it was brought back to life in Minecraft’s story mode as a mysterious order that killed the first Ender Dragon. 

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