Systematization of Minecraft Games

Basic Visual Representation of Minecraft Gaming Releases. Logos taken from Minecraft Wiki.

Depending on how popular game is, there's a chance it might get a few ports to new platforms. The most famous example of it is obviously going to be original DOOM with plethora of official and everlasting stream of ports made by enthusiasts. Minecraft appeared in time when gaming industry was moving away from the era of different platforms having their own unique features or even different games entirely. Because of that, you can say that all existing editions of Minecraft that were released are more or less the same.

Of course, that's oversimplification on my part: there has to be a lot of technical differences between all of them that might not be obvious to average player. This is not the topic of this post, I'm not that smart and there has to be a decently detailed explanation somewhere out there. What I was kind of interested in lately is creating a list of all Minecraft's currently existing official editions and video games (including spin-offs) with logical categorization.

Existing Lists.

It all started with me looking around in Minecraft Wiki. While it does list all supported and discontinued Minecraft editions and titles, I think there's a better way to categorize all of them. However, at first I had to dig further and see what kind of lists already exist out there in case someone already had the exact same idea. Because what if it ends up being a complete waste of time? I mean, you can say it is either way, but I'm talking about the possibility that there's exactly the type of list I intend to write down.

As it turns out, Mojang Studios actually thought about it and created their own "Different Minecraft Editions" article for Minecraft Help Center. It covers only the most of Minecraft editions though, not all of them. And no mention of spin-off titles on this page either. There's also this Minecraft Timeline thing on GitHub, but it is just a nicely stylized history of both Java and Bedrock Editions at this point of time. Besides that, nothing seem to stand out and all you get are some very basic articles that either copy aforementioned Minecraft Help Center article or bother to mention only two or three major versions of Minecraft: original (Java), Bedrock and Legacy Console.

Personal Interpretation.

So I guess the path is clear. While all the existing lists can (and will) be useful, I don't think any of them are doing great enough job to account for all currently existing versions and games. My interpretation includes seven groups of editions and spin-offs of Minecraft. For editions of the main game, I initially tried to sort out them based on programming language used: not only both Legacy Console & Bedrock Editions were written in C++, I also didn't want to single out a couple of versions because of JavaScript. I know that it's different thing from Java, but seven is a great number. Seven groups for 27 games.

That's not exactly what I imagined by stating that I want to write "more wacky" posts as what we have here is "ridiculous nonsense", to put it lightly. In case you want to be really dorky about it by following current nerdy trends, I guess you can refer to this list as "Ilko's interpretation of Minecraft Gaming Universe" in text format:

• Notch Group.

• Minecraft: Java Edition. 
  Initial Release Date: May 17, 2009.
  

• Minecraft 4k.
  Initial Release Date: December 2, 2009.
  

• MinecraftEdu.
  Initial Release Date: November 5, 2011.
  

• Minecraft: China Version.
  Initial Release Date: August 8, 2017.
  

• Minecraft Classic.
  Initial Release Date: May 7, 2019.
  

• Bedrock Group.

• Minecraft: Bedrock Edition.
  Initial Release Date: August 16, 2011.
  

• Minecraft: Pi Edition.
  Initial Release Date: February 11, 2013.
  

• Minecraft: Gear VR Edition.
  Initial Release Date: April 27, 2016.
  

• Minecraft Education.
  Initial Release Date: November 1, 2016.
  

• Minecraft: Fire TV Edition.
  Initial Release Date: December 19, 2016.
  

• Minecraft: Apple TV Edition.
  Initial Release Date: December 19, 2016.
  

• Minecraft: New 3DS Edition.
  Initial Release Date: September 13, 2017.
  

• Minecraft: China Version.
  Initial Release Date: September 15, 2017.
  

• 4J Group.

• Minecraft: Xbox 360 Edition.
  Initial Release Date: May 12, 2012.
  

• Minecraft: PlayStation 3 Edition.
  Initial Release Date: December 17, 2013.
  

• Minecraft: PlayStation 4 Edition.
  Initial Release Date: December 4, 2014.
  

• Minecraft: Xbox One Edition.
  Initial Release Date: December 5, 2014.
  

• Minecraft: PlayStation Vita Edition.
  Initial Release Date: October 14, 2014.
  

• Minecraft: Wii U Edition.
  Initial Release Date: December 17, 2015.
  

• Minecraft: Nintendo Switch Edition.
  Initial Release Date: May 11, 2017.
  

• Telltale Group.

• Minecraft: Story Mode.
  Initial Release Date: October 13, 2015.
  

• Minecraft: Story Mode - Season Two.
  Initial Release Date: July 11, 2017.
  

• Netflix's Minecraft: Story Mode.
  Initial Release Date: November 27, 2018.
  

• Earth Group.

• Minecraft Earth.
  Initial Release Date: December 11, 2019.
  

• Double Eleven Group.

• Minecraft Dungeons.
  Initial Release Date: May 26, 2020.
  

• Minecraft Dungeons Arcade.
  Initial Release Date: Summer 2021.
  

• Blackbird Group.

• Minecraft Legends.
  Current Release Date: April 18, 2023.
  

I'm not using numbered list because it's not as cooperative in editing and good-looking as bulleted, so it's slightly less dorky than I initially anticipated. "Initial Release Date" means the day when specific game or edition became publicly available whenever it's a proper release or public testing (Minecraft Legends is an exception since it's not released at this point in time). I've also wanted to specify their current status as of today (for example, available and unavailable), but there're a lot of nuances to this topic and I just couldn't be bothered with it right now.

Certain groups are named after the development companies fully or partially responsible for mentioned releases in order to simply acknowledge their existence. Everyone knows about Mojang Studios, but many people might miss out on other developers involved. That's also why I decided to go for "Notch Group" instead of Java Group. Markus Persson doesn't get much official recognition nowadays, all versions listed are his original work to the core, and it didn't felt like to label it as "Java" because JavaScript is a different thing. Despite this, I stuck with using official titles for each release (unless there's a repeat in one group) and I need to throw in some notes:

• Even though Mojang Studios never acknowledged Minecraft 4k, this edition of the game was created solely by Notch for Java 4K Game Programming Contest when he was one of the co-founders of the company.

• TeacherGaming was the developer of MinecraftEdu with this version of Minecraft being published by E-Line Media. Mojang Studios was licensing Java Edition to them.

• Minecraft: China Version is handled by NetEase, both Java and Bedrock Editions. This title is used by Mojang in aforementioned "Different Minecraft Editions".

• Minecraft: New 3DS Edition was developed by Other Ocean Interactive and based on Bedrock Edition.

• Minecraft Dungeons Arcade was created by Mojang Studios and Play Mechanix. Double Eleven supposedly had no direct involvement with this release.

Basic words like "Studios" and "Interactive" in Group names because they're kind of mundane. I'm also aware that now defunct Netflix's implementation of Minecraft: Story Mode took a form of interactive series, but I think that game's genre allows to "overlook" This list is meant to be nice and small. It's still kind of work in progress. I mean, I wanted to make a nice stylized image for this list and it as a thumbnail, but I just didn't have enough time to make it the way I want (especially with how I approach this type of thing).

Conclusion.

You didn't ask and don't care about it, but I have to acknowledge something and give it an explanation. The reason this post is not labelled as "Just an Idea" it just doesn't quite fit in the criteria I set for that Category. What I got here is (more or less) finished thing instead of a somewhat creative and mostly silly concept that most likely never comes to life. Besides, Thoughts Aloud are meant to be more relaxed in terms of material and research. At least I think it's future-proof since I think it's pretty clear that all future Minecraft releases would be either Bedrock Edition getting ported to new platforms or future spin-off titles.

There's also a couple of honorable mentions that don't quite fit in the list. I've written a post about Minicraft before and, while it was created by Markus "Notch" Persson when he was still in Mojang Studios, there's just no proper and direct connection to Minecraft. Both games are similar in some ways, but I don't think these similarities (including the name) can warrant a spot in the list. There're also four tutorials in Minecraft Hour of Code that might be viewed as games by some people in certain circumstances: I remember wasting my time on something similar thing during computer science class and to me, it was some silly little game at the time. Interactive learning might be a better term, I'm not sure.