Minecraft

Minecraft is a construction sandbox game where players use simple blocks in a 3D environment to create structures and more generally to alter the players environment. The game is being developed by Markus Persson, also known as Notch, and is currently in the alpha stage of development. Despite this, the latest stable version is currently free to play while the latest unstable version requires a user to pre-order the game. Pre-orders during alpha are set at the price of €9.95 and the full retail price is expected to be €20.00. Over 20,000 people have pre-ordered the game.

Creation
Notch has stated on the official Minecraft website his motivation to create the game: "'I started Minecraft after playing some Infiniminer with a couple of people from TigSource. I realized that a game that simple yet that dynamic had a lot of potential to turn into a really great game, and kept coming up with things I wanted to change and stuff I wanted to add. I had recently quit my job as a game developer to be able to focus more on indie game dev during my free time, and I was looking for a new game to develop. I had a few ideas floating around, but most required really long development times. These two factors led to Minecraft.' - Markus Persson (aka Notch)"

Gameplay
Minecraft has multiple game modes, all based around changing the player's environment by placing or removing pieces blocks in the world.

Survival Mode
Survival is the featured game mode in Minecraft where players attempt to survive against monsters that try to hurt them. The player has health, can wear armor, wield weapons, carry items, and has a score based on enemies killed. Survival mode is currently single player only, but is planned to expand to multiplayer before beta begins.

"Indev" and "Infdev" are seperate game clients for survival mode that are more recently updated and require pre-order to play.

Creative Mode
In creative mode a player plays alone or with others on a server to make constructions out of blocks. There is a larger variety of block-types to use than in survival mode and they are easier to create and destroy as well. It is currently the only mode with multiplayer.