Minecraft Earth

Submission 12,052

Part of a series on Minecraft. [View Related Entries]

About

Minecraft Earth is an augmented-reality mobile video game adaptation of the popular video game Minecraft. Much like the video game Pokémon GO players interact with the world using smartphone cameras, which captures the players surroundings and adds various holograms from the Minecraft world. Users then build upon those objects from their device.

History

On May 17th, 2019, the Minecraft YouTube channel published the "Official Reveal Trailer" for the video game. The game would be released for mobile platforms iOS and Android. Within 24 hours, the trailer received more than 324,000 views (shown below).

That day, The Verge^[3] published a preview of the game, in which the game's creators explained the lengths that they had gone to create an immersive experience. Minecraft Earth's game director Torfi Olafsson said, "We have covered the entire planet in Minecraft. Every lake is a place you can fish, every park is a place you can chop down trees. We’ve actually taken maps of the entire world and converted them to Minecraft.”

Reception

Trailer Reception

The trailer sparked conversation online. On Reddit, threads in the /r/games and /r/apple subreddits generated more than 1,000 points, respectively.^[1]^[2]

Many expressed their excitement for the game. Twitter user @ExpnandBanana posted a video of several people dancing in a mall with the caption "me and the boys on our way to kill the ender dragon in minecraft earth." The post received more than 890 retweets and 3,000 likes in 24 hours (shown below).

Throughout the day, others posted jokes, memes and expressions of delight about the game (examples below).

Several media outlets covered the announcement, including The Verge,^[3] Wired,^[4] TechRadar,^[5] IGN,^[6] Kotaku^[7] and more.