The game that inspired Minecraft is a hit on Steam!

Game News The game that inspired Minecraft is a hit on Steam!

Minecraft: video game icon

The principle of Minecraft is relatively simple. Sink randomly generated cubic world, players must survive by gathering resources, exploring, and crafting. Originally created by Marcus “Notch” Pearson, the title has been a worldwide success for over a decade. Owned by Microsoft since 2014Minecraft keep getting updatesand more than just a survival game.

Thanks to the mod, its creative component and a very active community, Minecraft is the heart of many projects. computer system recreation, place reproduction known whether real or fictitious, role play servers or allow PvP, anything is fine. We will see stream recently from Mynthos, BagheraJones, JDG, and Antoine Daniel or server launched by Inoxtag to see that the popularity of the title is undeniable. But Minecraft, like Prison Architects or Rimworld owes a lot to other games.

Before Minecraft, there was the Dwarf Fortress

The latter is called the Dwarf Fortress, and he has been successful for over 15 years with a community of enthusiasts. The game remains reserved for a niche player, in particular because a ASCII interfaceand the fact that the two creators, Tarn and Zach Adams, were careful avoid traditional distribution channels. Simply put, Dwarf Fortress earns random world, with its own resources, characters, reliefs, and dangers. Once the world is generated, the player collects the 7 dwarves, which match to manage and work.

But you have to pay attention to them, consider their needs, their desires, their strengths and weaknesses, and distribute the tasks as best as possible for the mine to grow. Very sharp in all game compartments, Dwarf Fortress is a a real-life simulation and high-end fantasy management game. This principle of random generation or the set of available options mostly Minecraft inspired and other games mentioned.

The commercial version of Dwarf Fortress is very popular on Steam!

But two developers, who share the title free while opening up the possibility of making a donationmust agree to prepare a more readable version, and sell it on Steam like a classic game. Published by Kitfox Games, this version sold out €28.99 offers “real” visuals, animations, more readable interface, full soundtrack and many new things. Suffice it to say that the bet worked, since launching on Steam on December 6th, Dwarf Fortress has sold over 500,000 copies. That total completely blew up the forecast from an economist hired by Kitfox, who estimated 160,000 copies sold in 2 months. A success that touches the heart of Tarn Adams, thinking about all the support he has received over the years:

Dwarf Fortress was a huge success, it seems. (…) But all this would be an illusion without you. (…) None of this would have been possible without the support of the people who have helped us (…) for these 20 amazing years, by far the best of my life (…). We won… and it’s your fault!

This success allowed the two brothers to become what they are today millionaire. They also had to hire a second programmer to support the game, but the main one was missing. Indeed, if the two brothers had agreed to publish the game in the classic way by proposing a complete overhaul, that’s related for the health problems faced by Zach Adams. The latter had to undergo a major and expensive operation, the cost of which was covered by his wife’s health insurance. But Le Monde reports that this episode caused a real “sobering up”. siblings, which was precarious until that point. For no longer have to depend on othersthat close, they accepted the idea of ​​selling the game:

At first we never thought about commercial distribution of the game. But the fact is that the cost of the healthcare system in the United States is too high to continue working as we have until now. If tomorrow a site like Patreon disappeared overnight, which is very likely in a world dominated by venture capital (think Twitter), we would be utterly screwed over the slightest health issue, said Tarn Adams at Vice.

It remains to be seen how far the game will go now that it has been thrown into the deep end. Everything indicates that the success will not stop there and, however, the developers have planned to continue adding new features and content.