The Sound of Minecraft: A melancholy masterpiece w/ C418

**Dallas Taylor** (0:02)
Can you hear me?

**SPEAKER_2** (0:03)
Yep.

**Dallas Taylor** (0:04)
What game are you playing right now?

**SPEAKER_2** (0:06)
Minecraft.

**Dallas Taylor** (0:07)
This is my seven-year-old daughter. What does Minecraft look like?

**SPEAKER_2** (0:11)
It looks like a world of squares. It is a world of squares totally.

**Dallas Taylor** (0:18)
She loves Minecraft. Why do kids like it so much?

**SPEAKER_2** (0:23)
Just because you can build so many things, create, even decorate a house if you'd like.

**Dallas Taylor** (0:31)
How often do you play it?

**SPEAKER_2** (0:32)
Really often, a lot often.

**Dallas Taylor** (0:37)
Is there anything about Minecraft that you think everybody should know about?

**SPEAKER_2** (0:41)
I think they should know about that it's really fun. If you're creative, you can create so much, and it won't make any messes.

**Dallas Taylor** (0:53)
Do you think I should do a whole podcast episode on Minecraft?

**SPEAKER_2** (0:56)
Yeah.

**Dallas Taylor** (1:00)
You're listening to 20,000 Hertz. I'm Dallas Taylor.
The story of Minecraft goes back to 2009, when an indie game designer named Marcus Persson posted a short video of his new project on YouTube. The video was called Cave Game Tech Test. It showed computerized blocks of green grass and gray rocks with a blue sky up above. Soon after, Marcus changed the name from Cave Game to Minecraft and started posting test versions of the game online. A few years later, in 2011, the full version of Minecraft was released, and the game exploded in popularity. Just three years after this release, Microsoft bought Minecraft for $2.5 billion.
It's now the best-selling video game of all time. The reason Minecraft is so successful is because you can choose how you want to play. It's an open-world sandbox game, which means you can build and shape the world around you with no rules and no goals, almost like virtual Legos.

**SPEAKER_2** (2:10)
Really, I like to play it just doing my own thing.

**Dallas Taylor** (2:13)
In survival mode, you collect materials like wood and stone to make buildings, all the while fighting off monsters and finding food to eat. In creative mode, you're invincible, and you have unlimited resources to build whatever you can think of. And this is how my daughter likes to play.
Do you play in survival mode or in creative mode?

**SPEAKER_2** (2:33)
Creative.

**Dallas Taylor** (2:34)
Why creative?

**SPEAKER_2** (2:35)
Because you can, like, build stuff and take a long time to do it.

**Dallas Taylor** (2:40)
What kind of stuff do you like building?

**SPEAKER_2** (2:42)
Houses and villages. Oh, and one time I built Disneyland.
But I'm still building it. It's really cool.

**Dallas Taylor** (2:54)
Minecraft players have made all kinds of incredible things. They've recreated King's Landing from Game of Thrones. They've built the Shire and the Starship Enterprise.
At one point, electrical circuits were added to the game, and players started building functional calculators and even simple computers. The best part is, if these creators have made their worlds public, anyone can explore them.

**SPEAKER_2** (3:16)
I love exploring. It's my favorite thing.

**Dallas Taylor** (3:24)
Over the years, the sound of Minecraft has become instantly recognizable. And amazingly, almost all of the original music and sound effects were made by one person.

**Daniel Rosenfeld** (3:35)
My name is Daniel Rosenfeld. I go under the moniker C418 as the music artist, and I write music and I do sound design as well.

**Dallas Taylor** (3:44)
All of the music in this episode is Daniel's Minecraft score.

**Daniel Rosenfeld** (3:48)
I guess like as a teenager, I realized that that is what I enjoyed doing, even though I wasn't good at it. But I kept doing it over and over again.

**Dallas Taylor** (3:57)
In the early 2000s, lots of indie game designers used an online forum called The Independent Game Source.

**Daniel Rosenfeld** (4:04)
It's not as big anymore today, but back then it was kind of like the breeding ground of the first generation big indies.
And I hung out on that community, and Marcus also frequented there. We talked there a lot.

**Dallas Taylor** (4:17)
Marcus told Daniel he was working on a new sandbox game.

**Daniel Rosenfeld** (4:20)
And the thing he was making obviously was Minecraft.

**Dallas Taylor** (4:24)
Marcus had heard some of Daniel's music and wanted him to score his upcoming game.

**Daniel Rosenfeld** (4:29)
He liked the music I was making, so we started collaborating. Thank you for watching.

**Dallas Taylor** (4:37)
From the beginning, Marcus gave Daniel a lot of freedom.

**Daniel Rosenfeld** (4:40)
I guess Marcus gave me complete free reign. He either didn't know how to limit me or was completely fine with what I was doing.

**Dallas Taylor** (4:49)