Check out the 14-year rags-to-riches history of the Minecraft website

The Minecraft website has been around as long as the sandbox game itself and, like the game, it’s gone through quite a few iterations. So we decided to take a look at how the website has changed, and it’s a fascinating glimpse at how quickly both Minecraft and the internet especially have changed in a short period of time.

Minecraft’s online history has been documented by the Web Design Museum, and after the team shared a look at the official Minecraft website in 2012, we decided to go down the rabbit hole of checking out what the Minecraft website used to look like and compare that to where it is now.

While Minecraft fully launched in 2011, it was actually in alpha in 2009. The website from back then outlines how there’s “nothing here yet!” but it’s fascinating to see both the cobblestone font and stone background, as you forget that the core visuals of Minecraft have actually been there for 14 years.

The Minecraft website sees its first big change in 2011, and now you can see Steve, a pig, a sheep, and even a video, which sells Minecraft in its most basic form, which is a total far cry from where the creative game is now.

The wildest part about this page is the message that reads, “So far 18,551,832 people have registered and 4,366,302 people bought the game,” and you can even watch this count up in real-time.

Everything appears to take a real turn in the 2016 version of the Minecraft webpage though, with Microsoft buying both developer Mojang and the IP of Minecraft in 2014 for a whopping $2.5 billion, as the whole thing is sleeker and clearly more expensive.
This is much closer to what the Minecraft website looks like today, but it’s still got to go through some changes yet.

As we come up to 2023, the site frames Minecraft more as a community than as an actual game, which is a testament to how much the space has grown since Minecraft launched 12 years ago. It’s no longer just about survival and creative worlds, but games within the game, community projects, and so much more.

You can check out the history of the Minecraft website and its web design courtesy of the Web Design Museum.

If all this reminiscing has you wanting to jump back into the sandbox world, we’ve got the best Minecraft skins you should have installed, the essential Minecraft seeds for starting a new world, and some free games like Minecraft if you want something similar but still different.