Aside: if you enjoy the Minecraft music albums, you should definitely check out C418's new album for Wanderstop that was released earlier this year. It has a lot of the same feeling to it, and I personally like it even more than the Minecraft albums now.
Tracks like Wanderstop Part 2, Earl Grey Part 2, Cinnamon Part 3, and The Forest are good places to start--it's three and a half hours long, so there's a lot to comb through.
I second this recommendation, I've been listening to the Wanderstop OST on shuffle for over a month now and find it delightful. The sister album "Wanderstop FM", which contains tracks that play diagetically on the in-game radio, is also excellent.
Reminds me of indie hit Balatro's soundtrack being commissioned on Fiverr:
>This month I contacted Luis Clemente on the freelance website Fiverr and he delivered an absolutely amazing soundtrack for Joker Poker. Really knocked it out of the park. I was very nervous about this because it was (at the time) the only money I had spent or planned to spend on the game.
How often are video game soundtracks created by well known artists? Especially without AAA studio resources?
Have there been that many big names in the space? Nobuo Uematsu for JRPGs, Jeremy Soule, Yasunori Mitsuda....who else has done enough that many people would have a chance of knowing their name?
The soundtrack of Quake is famously by Nine Inch Nails, a "band" which basically consists of Trent Reznor who these days is probably as famous for movie soundtracks like "The Social Network" or "Soul" or for TV soundtracks like the "Watchmen" series but at the time would have been called the "front man" of NiN.
GST channel on YouTube has a feature on Frank Klepacki. The artist features in that channel is in general great at highlighting VGM composers. But, like most of them, Klepacki is most famous for his game soundtrack work.
To name a few off the top of my head (although it might be cheating, because they’re much more famous for movie scores):
- Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (the original) was by Lorne Balfe and Hans Zimmer (personally, I think the end of Contingency sounds a lot like The Dark Knight)
- Wikipedia says that both of them also helped with Crysis 2
- Lorne Balfe did Assassin’s Creed 3
EDIT: Spotify reminds me that Harry Gregson-Williams did some of the Metal Gear Solids.
The soundtrack to Disco Elysium was made by the band British Sea Power (now just Sea Power).
I'd say that like Minecraft's music, it's good enough that it could almost have carried the game on its own.
Some indie games have licensed indie music, but generally I think it's hard to convince "big names" to make music for small games, unless they're already video game composers.
Yuzo Koshiro is pretty famous. If memory serves me correctly, Streets of Rage / Bare Knuckle was one the first games to prominently display the the composer's name.
> who else has done enough that many people would have a chance of knowing their name?
Not sure if that counts, but I suspect ZUN (Touhou) and Toby Fox (Undertale) are recognised by more people for their music than for their games. A lot of people have heard e.g. Megalovania, Spider Dance, Bad Apple, UN Owen was Her, or Flowering Nights, but don't know a single about the games they are from other than the name.
It used to be how most of the 8 and 16 bit home computer games were made, that is why the expression "bedroom coders" exists.
Many of those hits, of famous people still around the industry, were coded while working part-time on their teens, trying to sell their creations via magazines or the local publishers.
It really annoys me that Microsoft brought in new composers. You're so insistent on "owning" the music you give up on a major part of what made the game what it is today.
I understand this, and also partially feel this way as in it's garbo that they won't allow the artists to own their work and are able to strongarm this due to the size of Minecraft. On the other hand, I like a lot of the new tracks they've added as well and Lena Raine and the others have done a great job capturing the vibe while not just ripping off C418.
It annoys me even more that they forced everybody to migrate their Mojang accounts to Microsoft accounts. I never wanted a Microsoft account. They suck enormously, but even if you buy a non-Microsoft thing, you can apparently still be forced into their ecosystem.
With the new launcher, if you're using a Local account on Windows, they also try to trick to into using the account you log into Minecraft with as your whole-OS account. Big "yes, use this everywhere!" (paraphrased) accept button and a little "actually I just want to log into Minecraft" text option trying to hide underneath.
It's these little slights, multiplied by hundreds of other instances across the Microsoft and Windows 'experience' that added compounding, non-insignificant mental fatigue to my life.
It wasn't until I switched to Linux (Zorin) as my daily driver last month that I noticed this. Despite the initial adjustment pains, every time I open my laptop I now feel a sense of calm and stillness. My computer is exactly how I left it. It asks for my approval before doing things. It has no corporate agenda.
I use windows maybe once a year to see if some software builds or maybe play a game for a bit. It's almost comical how bad the experience is every time. Your comment on mental fatigue nails it - nothing on its own is _that_ bad but it all adds up and elevates the baseline stress level when you just want to get some stuff done.
My oldest son switched to Linux last week, but already wants to switch back because of gaming performance. But he found something called Tiny10, which is apparently Windows without all the bloatware. That might be a solution for people who really don't want to switch to Linux. But I'm never going back to Windows.
I hadn't noticed that yet. I wonder if my youngest son also gets that message and if he could make that change; he has no admin rights on the Windows laptop he uses for Minecraft, so I would hope he can't do that.
Although he also often gets the nag screen to upgrade to Win 11. That should also not be possible for him, but with Microsoft, you never know.
I owned a mojang account and didn't migrate it to microsoft. Now I just pirate the game whenever I want to play, it's pretty easy pollymc or pojavlauncher.
You can also play in multiplayer by going to server.properties of your server and setting online-mode=false
I get why they want that. Otherwise every time they want to do something "out of the box" with Minecraft they have to go through corporate and IP lawyers first.
The only thing they couldn't do with C418's music, was to publish "Minecraft: the official soundtrack" and take all the royalties themselves. Nor could they claim YouTube videos for having Minecraft's original music in it (they did it several times "accidentally" when the movie came out, and stole a couple of million from YouTube makers).
So no, I don't buy the "they'd have to go through lawyers" excuse. They could still have had blanket licenses for using the music in all sorts of ways, they just wouldn't own it.
Microsoft has pretty much only made Minecraft worse. Not maintaining it at all actually would have been better. Now I can't just set up a server and tell my friends to join it, I have to explain how to use an older client or how to install minetest.
That and before The Minecraft Movie came out, you could play multiplayer LAN from Xbox to PC cross platform without an XBox Live subscription.
Once the movie was released and they updated the game to add movie related content, this feature stopped working. Now to play multiplayer cross platform LAN, you have to pay for M$ servers you don’t use.
You couldn’t even load your world locally on the XBox if it was marked for multiplayer unless you had an Xbox Live account, meaning you got locked out of your world.
Fortunately you can edit the world setting to remove the multiplayer option to recover, but this was not documented at the time encountered.
They require a Microsoft account. There was a period of time where you could port over your Mojang account, but I and many other people did not, because I didn't want a Microsoft account or to have to agree to the Microsoft Terms of Service, a new legal contract which didn't exist at the time I paid for Minecraft. It's a classic bait and switch.
Then, the account migration window closed, and Mojang accounts stopped working. Now I and thousands of others can't play the game we paid good money for.
Yep, and when you get your Microsoft account, you have to deal with their fucked up login system. Many a child's tear (also adult's tears) has flown over their jank. Mojang never locked anyone out for 30 days when they reset a password.
Oh and they routinely give you other people's custom skins.
> Oh and they routinely give you other people's custom skins.
are you playing multiplayer on the Bedrock version? you just have to toggle a setting locally, or other player's skins will show up as a randomly preselected skin. it's called something like "Enable untrusted skins" or similar.
I think companies should be required to repay the original purchase price when they pull shit like that.
I did migrate, though with extreme reluctance, and my son's Minecraft account somehow ended up in my wife's Microsoft account (she'd had a Hotmail account since forever, he had no MS account).
There were also many stories (myself included) where Microsoft indifference could not port your account, even if you did it within the window. Sheer malfeasance that they could not just email a new code to everyone who had purchased the “lifetime” license.
This happened to me as well. I just opted to pirate the game. I figure I am allowed to since I have a lifetime license since alpha, just m$ dropped the ball porting my account.
Players had from October 2020 to December 2023, and emails were sent alerting customers of this. That's years more notice than the likes of others give, e.g., Twilio giving 2 months to announce the removal of their free SendGrid plan.
It's a game. If a professional SaaS provider gives two months then more than three years to migrate a game account is actually quite amazing.
If customers didn't want to migrate or just couldn't be bothered then that's on them. The game is cheap enough if you want to play it that badly.
Entitled.
Now do Meta killing Facebook Live video storage with a month's notice to download a decade's video per Facebook Page, for which only the page owner could do.
> There was a period of time where you could port over your Mojang account,
To be fair that was a fairly long period IIRC. And they really put some work into that last migration once they announced everything else is going away. Minecraft has all these legacy systems because nobody knew it would be huge, so during the Alpha and early Beta periods it's just whatever payment system they've cobbled together this week.
I'm still not sure if the scattered piles of emails, account names, IDs, passwords, receipt codes or other detritus eventually persuaded them I'm tialaramex or whether the fact I'm just very obviously tialaramex (it's gestured at in my email address, it's my HN account handle, if I ever tweeted, which I do not, I would be @tialaramex, it's everywhere) prevailed and so that's why I got my tialaramex Minecraft persona connected to whatever nonsense Microsoft have. But either way, once we reached the "Now a human is needed" step they were as helpful as you could ask given how cheap Minecraft was back when I bought it.
I think if you lost all contact for so long you weren't aware there was a migration it's not unreasonable to think if you suddenly regain interest you should pay for Minecraft. The current Minecraft is very different from what you last saw, albeit not in its essentials.
I was well aware of it. I don’t want a Microsoft account. I don’t do business with Microsoft.
Microsoft demanded that I agree to a new contract, the Microsoft Terms of Service, to which I do not and will not agree, to continue to use the game I already paid for.
This is called a bait-and-switch. I paid money, got the product, used the product, then they altered the deal, Vader style. Sign this new contract or you lose your game.
It’s bullshit any which way you slice it.
Arguably it’s Mojang’s fault for selling to such a shitty acquirer
and betraying their customers, not that we need any more reasons to understand what a total piece of trash Notch is.
You actually don't have to. You can just install the game and play it. Java Minecraft has no effective anti-piracy checks, which also means it has no effective legal-copy-but-not-using-a-microsoft-account checks. And the auto update URLs have no authorization checks at all. You can go to the root index URL (I don't remember it) and follow a few HATEOAS links to get any version-specific .jar that's available in the official launcher. This is an open secret and they leave it that way on purpose. Most third-party launchers (e.g. PrismLauncher) won't force you to log in before installing the game.
Of course, you should only install the game if you own a license to it. Otherwise that's piracy and it's illegal.
PrismLauncher does do an account check now, I learned after this comment. But there’s an easy bypass by putting some json into accounts.json and then it works fine.
It's Java. Wouldn't it be possible to decompile it and just remove the account checking? Maybe mod it out? There are mods that change the game dramatically, so why not this?
Yes, it’s more than possible to crack the game. All of the normal servers however will refuse to talk to you without you presenting valid login tokens from Microsoft, so you’re limited to local singleplayer.
And LAN play in "offline mode". There are some Internet servers in offline mode with aftermarket authentication systems bolted on, but mostly only 13yo pirates play them.
Did you think Microsoft was obligated to maintain your access to servers though? Even "stop killing games" doesn't ask that much.
But at least you can play the game. And maybe play with people with a similarly cracked version. That sounds entirely reasonable to me, if you don't want to have anything to do with Microsoft.
It really is great, haunting, nostalgic music that I associate with a formative time in my childhood. Beyond the game it’s also fantastic deep focus & coding soundtrack.
If you haven’t heard it, listen to Sweden or Aria Math.
The later composers for Minecraft have also crafted some exceptional pieces. Lena Raine's work was an instant hit. Nothing better than playing a Pigstep music disc at the end of a speedrun (because memes are more important than PBs).
Pigstep is OK, because the music disks were a bit oddball anyway, but I really don't like the non-c418 in game music. They feel out of place.
It also an issue that the reason c418 didn't get to keep doing the Minecraft music, was that he refused to do it on "work for hire, sign over all the rights" terms.
I'm quite certain there's a mod to manage your in-game playlists, and unlike in e.g. Factorio, the server doesn't even need to know about it.
As for c418, you're privileged as an artist when you get to keep your rights and make decent money. That was a very smart strategic move. Microsoft could've responded in any number of ways, but keeping the music + hiring new artists doesn't even sound like a bad compromise; these artists deserve the exposure, even if they can't match c418.
Yeah I like Lena but nobody was going to live up to the bar C418 set unless it was just ripping off of him entirely. Maybe if they got Brian Eno. But how many tracks are you going to get him to do for a videogame?
For some reason C418's song "Minecraft", alongside the "klink-klink" sound skeletons make when near you are etched into my brain, like screen burn-in. I can recall the combination of the song and that sound instantly, and it's clear as day in my mind's ear today, nearly 15 years since I've last played any serious Minecraft.
Aside: if you enjoy the Minecraft music albums, you should definitely check out C418's new album for Wanderstop that was released earlier this year. It has a lot of the same feeling to it, and I personally like it even more than the Minecraft albums now.
Tracks like Wanderstop Part 2, Earl Grey Part 2, Cinnamon Part 3, and The Forest are good places to start--it's three and a half hours long, so there's a lot to comb through.
I second this recommendation, I've been listening to the Wanderstop OST on shuffle for over a month now and find it delightful. The sister album "Wanderstop FM", which contains tracks that play diagetically on the in-game radio, is also excellent.
I bought it on Bandcamp a month ago and I've been playing it during focus time. I just love it!
It is incredible how Minecraft, and the soundtrack in particular, was created by unknown part timers.
A remix of Mice on Venus [0] is one of the few things that can make me cry on cue. There is something so powerful about it.
Doesn’t help it is often used in Technoblade tributes because of this video. [1]
[0]: https://youtube.com/watch?v=v1wMBrkUEFE
[1]: https://youtube.com/watch?v=pPmo21gkETU
Reminds me of indie hit Balatro's soundtrack being commissioned on Fiverr:
>This month I contacted Luis Clemente on the freelance website Fiverr and he delivered an absolutely amazing soundtrack for Joker Poker. Really knocked it out of the park. I was very nervous about this because it was (at the time) the only money I had spent or planned to spend on the game.
(from https://localthunk.com/blog/balatro-timeline-3aarh)
From a simple Fiverr gig to having your music featured at the Game Awards. https://youtu.be/N_4Hyet9-3w?si=dtI31IhO6yUKWdqa
How often are video game soundtracks created by well known artists? Especially without AAA studio resources?
Have there been that many big names in the space? Nobuo Uematsu for JRPGs, Jeremy Soule, Yasunori Mitsuda....who else has done enough that many people would have a chance of knowing their name?
The soundtrack of Quake is famously by Nine Inch Nails, a "band" which basically consists of Trent Reznor who these days is probably as famous for movie soundtracks like "The Social Network" or "Soul" or for TV soundtracks like the "Watchmen" series but at the time would have been called the "front man" of NiN.
Quake was the AAA of its time but yeah, hiring NIN was ahead of its time.
Just throwing https://www.frankklepacki.com/listen/soundtracks out there. This is the composer of the C&C, and many more, soundtracks.
GST channel on YouTube has a feature on Frank Klepacki. The artist features in that channel is in general great at highlighting VGM composers. But, like most of them, Klepacki is most famous for his game soundtrack work.
To name a few off the top of my head (although it might be cheating, because they’re much more famous for movie scores):
- Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (the original) was by Lorne Balfe and Hans Zimmer (personally, I think the end of Contingency sounds a lot like The Dark Knight)
- Wikipedia says that both of them also helped with Crysis 2
- Lorne Balfe did Assassin’s Creed 3
EDIT: Spotify reminds me that Harry Gregson-Williams did some of the Metal Gear Solids.
The soundtrack to Disco Elysium was made by the band British Sea Power (now just Sea Power).
I'd say that like Minecraft's music, it's good enough that it could almost have carried the game on its own.
Some indie games have licensed indie music, but generally I think it's hard to convince "big names" to make music for small games, unless they're already video game composers.
Yuzo Koshiro is pretty famous. If memory serves me correctly, Streets of Rage / Bare Knuckle was one the first games to prominently display the the composer's name.
> who else has done enough that many people would have a chance of knowing their name?
Not sure if that counts, but I suspect ZUN (Touhou) and Toby Fox (Undertale) are recognised by more people for their music than for their games. A lot of people have heard e.g. Megalovania, Spider Dance, Bad Apple, UN Owen was Her, or Flowering Nights, but don't know a single about the games they are from other than the name.
Disasterpeace! He did “It Follows”, “Marcel the Shell” and the OST to Fez, Hyperlidht Drifter and more.
This would be AAA of the time, but Michael Jackson did some composing for Sonic 3.
Halo 2 had Steve Vai but not really composing.
Mario Kart 8 and the new one had lots of established apanese fusion players.
Marcin Przybyłowicz for The Witcher. Borislav Slavov for BG3. Jesper Kyd Assassin's Creed.
Really enjoy Jesper's work. Especially "City of Rome".
I'd also recommend...
Gareth Coker (Ori & the Blind Forest)
"9999999" from the Portal 2 Soundtrack: Songs to Test By (composed by a Valve staffer)
Brian Tyler's Far Cry 3 is also a great listen (sure, he's a film composer but I like it)
It used to be how most of the 8 and 16 bit home computer games were made, that is why the expression "bedroom coders" exists.
Many of those hits, of famous people still around the industry, were coded while working part-time on their teens, trying to sell their creations via magazines or the local publishers.
It really annoys me that Microsoft brought in new composers. You're so insistent on "owning" the music you give up on a major part of what made the game what it is today.
I understand this, and also partially feel this way as in it's garbo that they won't allow the artists to own their work and are able to strongarm this due to the size of Minecraft. On the other hand, I like a lot of the new tracks they've added as well and Lena Raine and the others have done a great job capturing the vibe while not just ripping off C418.
Lena is an incredibly talented composer.
If anybody is curious: https://lena.fyi/
The Celeste soundtrack is wonderful: https://radicaldreamland.bandcamp.com/album/celeste-original...
It annoys me even more that they forced everybody to migrate their Mojang accounts to Microsoft accounts. I never wanted a Microsoft account. They suck enormously, but even if you buy a non-Microsoft thing, you can apparently still be forced into their ecosystem.
With the new launcher, if you're using a Local account on Windows, they also try to trick to into using the account you log into Minecraft with as your whole-OS account. Big "yes, use this everywhere!" (paraphrased) accept button and a little "actually I just want to log into Minecraft" text option trying to hide underneath.
It's these little slights, multiplied by hundreds of other instances across the Microsoft and Windows 'experience' that added compounding, non-insignificant mental fatigue to my life.
It wasn't until I switched to Linux (Zorin) as my daily driver last month that I noticed this. Despite the initial adjustment pains, every time I open my laptop I now feel a sense of calm and stillness. My computer is exactly how I left it. It asks for my approval before doing things. It has no corporate agenda.
I use windows maybe once a year to see if some software builds or maybe play a game for a bit. It's almost comical how bad the experience is every time. Your comment on mental fatigue nails it - nothing on its own is _that_ bad but it all adds up and elevates the baseline stress level when you just want to get some stuff done.
My oldest son switched to Linux last week, but already wants to switch back because of gaming performance. But he found something called Tiny10, which is apparently Windows without all the bloatware. That might be a solution for people who really don't want to switch to Linux. But I'm never going back to Windows.
I hadn't noticed that yet. I wonder if my youngest son also gets that message and if he could make that change; he has no admin rights on the Windows laptop he uses for Minecraft, so I would hope he can't do that.
Although he also often gets the nag screen to upgrade to Win 11. That should also not be possible for him, but with Microsoft, you never know.
I owned a mojang account and didn't migrate it to microsoft. Now I just pirate the game whenever I want to play, it's pretty easy pollymc or pojavlauncher.
You can also play in multiplayer by going to server.properties of your server and setting online-mode=false
Yes, you can only join a server with that setting set to false.
The launchers for Linux are readily available, too.
I get why they want that. Otherwise every time they want to do something "out of the box" with Minecraft they have to go through corporate and IP lawyers first.
The only thing they couldn't do with C418's music, was to publish "Minecraft: the official soundtrack" and take all the royalties themselves. Nor could they claim YouTube videos for having Minecraft's original music in it (they did it several times "accidentally" when the movie came out, and stole a couple of million from YouTube makers).
So no, I don't buy the "they'd have to go through lawyers" excuse. They could still have had blanket licenses for using the music in all sorts of ways, they just wouldn't own it.
Microsoft has pretty much only made Minecraft worse. Not maintaining it at all actually would have been better. Now I can't just set up a server and tell my friends to join it, I have to explain how to use an older client or how to install minetest.
For what it's worth the latest album (Chase the Skies) has some _very_ early Minecraft vibes.
I'm further annoyed that Microsoft stole Minecraft from me. I can't play a game a paid for. Absolute scumbags of the highest order.
If you bought it from Notch, I think he gave you permission to pirate it if that ever happens.
Hmm? What'd they do to it?
That and before The Minecraft Movie came out, you could play multiplayer LAN from Xbox to PC cross platform without an XBox Live subscription.
Once the movie was released and they updated the game to add movie related content, this feature stopped working. Now to play multiplayer cross platform LAN, you have to pay for M$ servers you don’t use.
You couldn’t even load your world locally on the XBox if it was marked for multiplayer unless you had an Xbox Live account, meaning you got locked out of your world.
Fortunately you can edit the world setting to remove the multiplayer option to recover, but this was not documented at the time encountered.
They require a Microsoft account. There was a period of time where you could port over your Mojang account, but I and many other people did not, because I didn't want a Microsoft account or to have to agree to the Microsoft Terms of Service, a new legal contract which didn't exist at the time I paid for Minecraft. It's a classic bait and switch.
Then, the account migration window closed, and Mojang accounts stopped working. Now I and thousands of others can't play the game we paid good money for.
Fuck Notch and Microsoft both.
Yep, and when you get your Microsoft account, you have to deal with their fucked up login system. Many a child's tear (also adult's tears) has flown over their jank. Mojang never locked anyone out for 30 days when they reset a password.
Oh and they routinely give you other people's custom skins.
> Oh and they routinely give you other people's custom skins.
are you playing multiplayer on the Bedrock version? you just have to toggle a setting locally, or other player's skins will show up as a randomly preselected skin. it's called something like "Enable untrusted skins" or similar.
No, Java. I'll go through the settings again and doublecheck but sometimes the skin will change and it won't accept you changing it back for weeks.
I think companies should be required to repay the original purchase price when they pull shit like that.
I did migrate, though with extreme reluctance, and my son's Minecraft account somehow ended up in my wife's Microsoft account (she'd had a Hotmail account since forever, he had no MS account).
There were also many stories (myself included) where Microsoft indifference could not port your account, even if you did it within the window. Sheer malfeasance that they could not just email a new code to everyone who had purchased the “lifetime” license.
This happened to me as well. I just opted to pirate the game. I figure I am allowed to since I have a lifetime license since alpha, just m$ dropped the ball porting my account.
Players had from October 2020 to December 2023, and emails were sent alerting customers of this. That's years more notice than the likes of others give, e.g., Twilio giving 2 months to announce the removal of their free SendGrid plan.
It's a game. If a professional SaaS provider gives two months then more than three years to migrate a game account is actually quite amazing.
If customers didn't want to migrate or just couldn't be bothered then that's on them. The game is cheap enough if you want to play it that badly.
Entitled.
Now do Meta killing Facebook Live video storage with a month's notice to download a decade's video per Facebook Page, for which only the page owner could do.
Oh shit. It's been more than a decade since I played Minecraft but sounds like I, too, have lost my account then.
> There was a period of time where you could port over your Mojang account,
To be fair that was a fairly long period IIRC. And they really put some work into that last migration once they announced everything else is going away. Minecraft has all these legacy systems because nobody knew it would be huge, so during the Alpha and early Beta periods it's just whatever payment system they've cobbled together this week.
I'm still not sure if the scattered piles of emails, account names, IDs, passwords, receipt codes or other detritus eventually persuaded them I'm tialaramex or whether the fact I'm just very obviously tialaramex (it's gestured at in my email address, it's my HN account handle, if I ever tweeted, which I do not, I would be @tialaramex, it's everywhere) prevailed and so that's why I got my tialaramex Minecraft persona connected to whatever nonsense Microsoft have. But either way, once we reached the "Now a human is needed" step they were as helpful as you could ask given how cheap Minecraft was back when I bought it.
I think if you lost all contact for so long you weren't aware there was a migration it's not unreasonable to think if you suddenly regain interest you should pay for Minecraft. The current Minecraft is very different from what you last saw, albeit not in its essentials.
You are missing the point.
I was well aware of it. I don’t want a Microsoft account. I don’t do business with Microsoft.
Microsoft demanded that I agree to a new contract, the Microsoft Terms of Service, to which I do not and will not agree, to continue to use the game I already paid for.
This is called a bait-and-switch. I paid money, got the product, used the product, then they altered the deal, Vader style. Sign this new contract or you lose your game.
It’s bullshit any which way you slice it.
Arguably it’s Mojang’s fault for selling to such a shitty acquirer and betraying their customers, not that we need any more reasons to understand what a total piece of trash Notch is.
You actually don't have to. You can just install the game and play it. Java Minecraft has no effective anti-piracy checks, which also means it has no effective legal-copy-but-not-using-a-microsoft-account checks. And the auto update URLs have no authorization checks at all. You can go to the root index URL (I don't remember it) and follow a few HATEOAS links to get any version-specific .jar that's available in the official launcher. This is an open secret and they leave it that way on purpose. Most third-party launchers (e.g. PrismLauncher) won't force you to log in before installing the game.
Of course, you should only install the game if you own a license to it. Otherwise that's piracy and it's illegal.
PrismLauncher does do an account check now, I learned after this comment. But there’s an easy bypass by putting some json into accounts.json and then it works fine.
It's Java. Wouldn't it be possible to decompile it and just remove the account checking? Maybe mod it out? There are mods that change the game dramatically, so why not this?
Yes, it’s more than possible to crack the game. All of the normal servers however will refuse to talk to you without you presenting valid login tokens from Microsoft, so you’re limited to local singleplayer.
And LAN play in "offline mode". There are some Internet servers in offline mode with aftermarket authentication systems bolted on, but mostly only 13yo pirates play them.
Did you think Microsoft was obligated to maintain your access to servers though? Even "stop killing games" doesn't ask that much.
But at least you can play the game. And maybe play with people with a similarly cracked version. That sounds entirely reasonable to me, if you don't want to have anything to do with Microsoft.
It's a relief Google didn't acquire minecraft...no humans in the loop to help you out.
It really is great, haunting, nostalgic music that I associate with a formative time in my childhood. Beyond the game it’s also fantastic deep focus & coding soundtrack.
If you haven’t heard it, listen to Sweden or Aria Math.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=gVYjlmB81Hc
The later composers for Minecraft have also crafted some exceptional pieces. Lena Raine's work was an instant hit. Nothing better than playing a Pigstep music disc at the end of a speedrun (because memes are more important than PBs).
Pigstep is OK, because the music disks were a bit oddball anyway, but I really don't like the non-c418 in game music. They feel out of place.
It also an issue that the reason c418 didn't get to keep doing the Minecraft music, was that he refused to do it on "work for hire, sign over all the rights" terms.
I'm quite certain there's a mod to manage your in-game playlists, and unlike in e.g. Factorio, the server doesn't even need to know about it.
As for c418, you're privileged as an artist when you get to keep your rights and make decent money. That was a very smart strategic move. Microsoft could've responded in any number of ways, but keeping the music + hiring new artists doesn't even sound like a bad compromise; these artists deserve the exposure, even if they can't match c418.
Yeah I like Lena but nobody was going to live up to the bar C418 set unless it was just ripping off of him entirely. Maybe if they got Brian Eno. But how many tracks are you going to get him to do for a videogame?
(Trivia: Eno did the win95 startup sound)
Eno already did it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SrZYP8SzlN8
Lena wasn't my favorite, but I've really loved the new music by Aaron Cherof, in particular "Watcher" and "Featherfall".
https://archive.is/k91o9
For some reason C418's song "Minecraft", alongside the "klink-klink" sound skeletons make when near you are etched into my brain, like screen burn-in. I can recall the combination of the song and that sound instantly, and it's clear as day in my mind's ear today, nearly 15 years since I've last played any serious Minecraft.
Quick check shows he made about ~$2M in royalties on Spotify, maybe a bit more with YouTube monetization.
Maybe the movie made a good chunk for him too.
Curious what the offer was, it likely was higher since Microsoft just wanted to have clear ownership over the entire IP.
https://web.archive.org/web/20250720113004/https://www.billb...
https://archive.ph/MORIQ
Sweden is my favorite track
I really dont like people sharing paywalled articles, here’s the non paywalled version for those who are curious to read it: https://archive.ph/Erzmg