Game news The game that inspired Minecraft is a hit on Steam!
Do we still need to present Minecraft? More than 10 years after its release, Mojang’s game is the best-selling title of all time thanks to its numerous ports and its infinite creative possibilities. But Minecraft didn’t arrive without having been influenced by other games, and one of them is currently a hit on Steam!
Minecraft: a video game icon
The principle of Minecraft is relatively simple. Immersed in a randomly generated cubic world, players must survive by collecting resources, exploring, and crafting. Originally created by Marcus “Notch” Pearson, the title has been a worldwide success for more than a decade. Owned by Microsoft since 2014Minecraft keep getting updatesand is much more than just a survival game.
Thanks to mods, its creative component, and an extremely active community, Minecraft is at the heart of many projects. Computer system recreations, reproductions of places known whether real or fictitious, role play servers or allowing PvP, anything goes. Just see the recent streams of Mynthos, BagheraJones, JDG, and Antoine Daniel or the server launched by Inoxtag to see that the popularity of the title is undeniable. But Minecraft, like Prison Architect or Rimworld owe a lot to another game.
Before Minecraft, there was Dwarf Fortress
The latter is called Dwarf Fortress, and he has been successful for more than 15 years with a community of enthusiasts. The game had remained reserved for a niche of players, in particular because of a ASCII interfaceand the fact that the two creators, Tarn and Zach Adams, have carefully avoided traditional distribution channels. Simply put, Dwarf Fortress generates a random world, with its own resources, characters, reliefs and dangers. Once the world is generated, players collect 7 dwarves, which are suitable to manage and put to work.
But you have to do pay attention to them, take into account their needs, their desires, their strengths and their weaknesses, and distribute the tasks as best as possible so that the mine develops. Extremely sharp in all compartments of the game, Dwarf Fortress is a real life simulation and a top notch fantasy management game. This principle of random generation or the set of available options largely inspired Minecraft and the other games mentioned.
The commercial version of Dwarf Fortress is a hit on Steam!
But the two developers, who distributed the title for free while opening the possibility of making donationshad to agree to prepare a more readable version, and sell it on Steam like a classic game. Published by Kitfox Games, this version sold €28.99 offers “real” visuals, animations, a more readable interface, a complete soundtrack and a whole bunch of new stuff. Suffice to say that the bet is successful, since since its launch on Steam on December 6, Dwarf Fortress has sold over 500,000 copies. A total that literally explodes the forecasts of the economist hired by Kitfox, which predicted 160,000 copies sold in 2 months. A success that touches Tarn Adams, who thinks of all the support received over many years:
Dwarf Fortress is a wild success, it seems. (…) But all this would be an illusion without you. (…) None of this would have been possible without the support of the people who have helped us (…) throughout these 20 incredible years, by far the best of my life (…). We win… and it’s your fault!
This success allows the two brothers to now be millionaires. They also had to recruit a second programmer to support the game, but the main thing is not there. Indeed, if the two brothers have agreed to publish the game in a classic way by proposing a complete overhaul, it is linked to the health problems faced by Zach Adams. The latter had to undergo a major and costly operation, the costs of which were covered by his wife’s health insurance. But Le Monde reports that this episode caused a real “realization” siblings, who had been very precarious until then. For no longer have to depend on someone elseas close as it was, they accepted the idea of selling the game:
We never thought of a commercial distribution of the game, originally. But the fact is that the cost of the health system in the United States is too high to continue working as we have been doing until now. If tomorrow a site like Patreon disappeared overnight, which could very well happen in a world dominated by venture capital (think Twitter), we would be completely screwed for the slightest health problem, said Tarn Adams at Vice.
It only remains to be seen how far the game will go now that it has been thrown into the deep end. Everything suggests that the success will not stop there and, in any case, the developers have planned to continue adding new features and content.
