15 Years of Minecraft

Minecraft was celebrating its 15th anniversary this month, and made it a lot of fun.  There was a bit of a scavenger hunt across Tiktok and Discord to get some capes, and one free piece of character bling per day.  Those is not really my thing, but I am now wearing an axolotl cap on my head and some weird nether leggings.  This was a big showcase event for Bedrock edition, as most of these items wont work in Java until some future update, if ever.

The key item for me was their 15th Celebration map, which was a massive piece of eye candy at first, with hundreds of custom blocks and custom paintings I wish we could get for our own builds.  (Then I realized they are probably available in Bedrock add-ons or will be soon.)  But after exploring, it just went on and on, with a delightful central cake room surrounded by tables where every major creature and character in the game had a carefully scripted cake-eating routine.  Some of those were comedy classic.  My top pick would be the wandering trader and his llamas doing and almost Abbott & Costello routine.  So well scripted.

There was a sticker book, and you could find stickers along the way with various hints and activities.  I figured there might be 6 or 10 sticketrs, but it just kept going.  There were portals to themed museums, all of them gorgeous and filled with activities.  There were at least 10 mini games that did things I didn't know you could do in MC.  The most elaborate was the one where you can toggle back and forth between the current version and an old retro version to complete a path where one dimension had an obstacle and you had to shift to the other dimension to get around it.  That was brilliant.

At another location there was a gorgeous beehive about 15 blocks high and wide, and after exploring the whole bee area, it turns out that you have to jump down into the hive and navigate the world of honey blocks to get to a mini game where you navigate a bee from flower to flower picking up pollen to bring back to your hive.

There was a mini game where you play a frog and shoot out your tongue to catch slimes.  In another game, you jump form one gian mushroom to another trying to tag mooshrooms with a lightning rod.

Mini games and gags and sights were everywhere.  I'm not sure I have ever seen such a detailed map designed for just having fun.  The studio that built that map showed off so many features and game functions I didn't know were possible.  It was a blast.


I have been playing Minecraft since the Alpha days.  I still think it has been the best value I ever got in gaming: I paid $15 way back then, and have had 15 years of free updates and have tested about 500 mods.  I did have to buy another copy when Microsoft took over the Mojang accounts and my old email was unreachable, but let's not think about that one incident.  ;-)

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