The Sound of Minecraft: A melancholy masterpiece w/ C418

**SPEAKER_1** (0:02)
Can you hear me?

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

**SPEAKER_1** (0:04)
What game are you playing right now?

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

**SPEAKER_1** (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.

**SPEAKER_1** (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.

**SPEAKER_1** (0:31)
How often do you play it?

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

**SPEAKER_1** (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.

**SPEAKER_1** (0:53)
Do you think I should do a whole podcast episode on Minecraft?

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

**SPEAKER_1** (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.

**SPEAKER_1** (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.

**SPEAKER_1** (2:34)
Why creative?

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

**SPEAKER_1** (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.

**SPEAKER_1** (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.

**SPEAKER_1** (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.

**SPEAKER_3** (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.

**SPEAKER_1** (3:44)
All of the music in this episode is Daniel's Minecraft score.

**SPEAKER_3** (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.

**SPEAKER_1** (3:57)
In the early 2000s, lots of indie game designers used an online forum called The Independent Game Source.

**SPEAKER_3** (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.

**SPEAKER_1** (4:17)
Marcus told Daniel he was working on a new sandbox game.

**SPEAKER_3** (4:20)
And the thing he was making obviously was Minecraft.

**SPEAKER_1** (4:24)
Marcus had heard some of Daniel's music and wanted him to score his upcoming game.

**SPEAKER_3** (4:29)
He liked the music I was making, so we started collaborating. Thank you for watching.

**SPEAKER_1** (4:37)
From the beginning, Marcus gave Daniel a lot of freedom.

**SPEAKER_3** (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.

**SPEAKER_1** (4:49)
Before he could start composing, Daniel had to figure out what style this new game needed.

**SPEAKER_3** (4:55)
At the time, video games, especially in our branch, the indie games, we were kind of stuck in chiptune.