Discontinued Legacy of Infiniminer

Infiniminer Screenshot. Taken from Zachtronics Industries.

Being the first doesn't always guarantee the success and popularity for anyone or anything. Whenever it's fair or not shall be determined on case-by-case situations, but at the end that's just part of how things go in life. I've already talked about Chasm: The Rift a few weeks ago, and I don't want to stop there when it comes to highlighting lesser known titles. That's pretty interesting subject for me lately, so I figured that it's time to pick another hidden gem and there's a very good candidate for it. Especially at this point in time.

As a part of celebration of the upcoming Minecraft Live 2021, it felt just right to go back to the basics with Infiniminer: the game that, despite its pretty short lifespan, did kick off the trend of using blocks in video games. The actual story of Infiniminer is both tragic and funny (depending on your perspective), but its legacy is legendary. So I would like to pay the proper tribute to this game by just telling its story and reminding you about it.

 

Another Infinite Chapter.

Ironically enough, Infiniminer wasn't really the first. I guess that's not really a surprise, but just let me explain. Game's creator, Zach Barth, created various games in so-called "Infinifranchise". Previous game in that series was Infinifrag, which was initially planned as a hybrid of Real-Time Strategy and First-Person Shooter, but then dropped the RTS portion after discussions with his friend Keith Holman that later helped him create the game. The sequel of Infinifrag was in development for some time and, well... Let's just say that some screenshots do look pretty interesting.

Infinifrag 2 Screenshot. Taken from Dan Hathaway.

Anyway, Zach kept working on various video games in his spare time. Inspired by Team Fortress 2 and Motherload, he decided to combine the elements of those games with Infinifrag and that led to the birth of Infiniminer:

Zach Barth: "Infiniminer is a combination of Infinifrag, Team Fortress 2 and Motherload. I wanted to make a competitive mining game, and this was it."

That was it indeed. Just a multiplayer game where players took control of sprite units with different classes in two teams and compete with each other for mining resource in blocky world, but many of them were gravitating towards using all those blocks as an expression of their creativity through building bases and stuff in favor of game's original goal. Why Infiniminer faded away into obscurity relatively quickly then? A big mistake was made.

Infiniminer's source code was unintentionally leaked via un-obfuscated .NET assembly, allowing everyone to change the game however they want. While the idea of releasing the source code of your game is mostly a good thing, especially if you look towards id Software and how much impact John Carmack's stance of open-source software influenced the entire industry, this particular instance was definitely premature. That's what killed off Zach's interest in this game, so he ended up making it open source officially and basically left it behind. Meanwhile, around the same time, another game started to take shape...

Undying Heritage.

I think it's pretty much undeniable that games with block worlds have immense potential. Markus "Notch" Persson was working on yet another game called RubyDung. From what is known, that title was influenced by legendary Dwarf Fortress with isometric perspective and 3D graphics where you was supposed to build bases. It also took clues from Dungeon Keeper as Notch decided to add a first person view in RubyDung, similarly to that game. Then he found out that it looked too distorted, so that mode was cut.

RubyDung Screenshot. Taken from Minecraft Wiki.

After that Markus discovered Infiniminer and he was immediatly captured by it. He was one of those players who were fascinated by building aspect of this game and later cited lack of variation and red/blue blocks as its major flaws. Notch saw the potential in this style, so he reused some code and art from RubyDung to make a "Cave Game": the very first version of Minecraft. The rest is history of its own, the one different from Infiniminer.

Conclusion.

If you're reading this, you most likely already know how things went from there when it comes to Minecraft. So, what about Zach Barth? He's still around as a game developer in his independent studio Zachtronics. A lot of games has been after Infiniminer, including Infinifactory. According to Zach himself, this game is a 3D version of his earlier game Manufactoid that was "made to not suck". Even though some people would surely make comparisons with Factorio and other similar titles of that kind, Infinifactory takes the foundation of Manufactoid and mixes it with Infiniminer and SpaceChem.

As for the subject of this post, Infiniminer is still out there in the wild. Remembered by its creators and probably quite a few people all around the world. While most of them likely to know of is "that Minecraft game before Minecraft", there has to be some people that still open up Infiniminer to this very day in small niche groups. That's definitely not even close to current scope of Mojang's classic, I would still recommend you to look out for this historical title with friends and give it at least a few minutes to pay respect for what Infiniminer made possible.