I’m here in Las Vegas covering Minecon, and I’ll tell you right off the bat: Minecon is not your typical convention.
Minecraft launch party
Minecon, so far, is more of a big launch party for the first release of the extremely popular game. Due to Minecraft’s open beta testing, there was not really anything new to see that was not available in the pre-release builds. In the ballroom, where Mojang did a live launch of Mincraft, there stood a scale stack of bricks containing a sign stating “Activate Minecraft”—and under it, a switch. The switch was flipped at 1pm Pacific time and from now on, Minecraft is out of beta. Creator “Notch” indicated during the Mojang Panel Friday afternoon that they will now be focusing on the long-promised mod support for the game.
The Minecon show floor
The show floor was built like a minecraft world. Everything was panels—made to look like dirt, stone, and cobblestone blocks. There were to-scale mobs (monsters) of all sorts, including an Ender Dragon and—my favorite—the Mooshroom. The bulk of the Minecon show floor consisted of a large setup of at least fifty computers. These were used for demos of Mojang’s upcoming games Scrolls and Cobalt along with a Minecraft building contest. The rest of the floor was a maze of lines. The most popular attraction seemed to be the Jinx merchandise booth. A limited edition, glow-in-the-dark vinyl Creeper was the main attraction but even after that sold out (halfway through the day), hundreds of people still waited to get the remaining shirts, jewelry, and foam pick axes. Other popular booths were IGN, doing a “Real Life Mining” game, where attendees dug through a group of Minecraft blocks in search for a diamond or iron block, and the Xperia booth where fans could try out Minecraft mobile on the Xperia Play.
Minecraft for Xbox Live
The big news—and this was obvious as soon as you walked out onto the floor—was that Minecraft will be coming to Xbox Live. The Xbox booth allowed players to try out the early work-in-progress builds of Minecraft. Minecraft will be available for Xbox Live in Spring of 2012 and will include multiplayer, leader boards and achievements. Minecon attendees were given an exclusive code for a Minecon 2011 cape for their Xbox Live avatar.
All of the panels over both days of Minecon will be available to view on Mojang’s website. Be sure to check them out if you are interested in any aspect of Minecraft—from running a server, to building epic builds and uploading them to YouTube. Keep an eye on Icrontic’s Minecraft forum—it’s going to be an exciting week and we will be starting a new world for everyone to explore!
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