I was in my mid to early teens and Minecraft wasn’t out fully yet. It was a holiday season get together with family, my family flew across the country to spend time with them. My cousin, my older brother, and myself were all playing together when I accidentally broke a block underneath an anvil for the first time and learned they could fall. This was on a platform pretty high in the sky so I assumed it would be no big deal. I let out a muted “oh.” of mild surprise at my discovery, then a few seconds later heard my cousin the the other room roar “WHAAAAAT?!”.
A small message popped up on my screen: “James was squashed by a falling anvil.”
Funny to think so such a small thing ended up becoming the inspiration for my go to username from then on.
Minecraft before Microsoft bought it out and forced me to make a Microsoft account just to play it.
At some point, I had stopped playing Minecraft and I had an account since alpha but because of their account migrations where I hadn’t created a new username on the 2nd sign on system and the fact that so no longer had a receipt, I wasn’t able to recover my account. It was quite disappointing.
But I bought an account to play on Windows in bedrock because my son started playing and he wanted to play together with me. We still play and we could play for hours, just exploring and mining for stuff.
The adventure and terror of not understanding how it all works when I first started playing. Mobs were scary, crafting recepies gave possibilities I didn’t know existed.
First time I ever played minecraft it was in 1.2 and I spawned in on a spruce beach, I had a crappy 3x2 sand hut with a dirt roof and a tower sticking out the side that went way up into the air. I wish I still had that world but I haven’t even been able to find the seed again let alone a 12 year old save. It was my first time playing anything on PC too so I had no idea how to move and started trying to move using the arrow keys and I thought I had a broken copy of the game.
Hanging out with friends in the /r/Minecraft irc channel. Talking with etho was cool too, albeit brief. Also, playing on oc.tc back in the day with them, which is what inspired Minecraft to implement the ding sound when you make a hit with the bow.
Edit:
Oh yeah, Minecon in Florida was cool too. Sethbling and I rode the teacups together at Universal.
Played Alpha and vividly remembered the first night when the monsters come out. Terrified.
Then I discovered mods. Entire game changer when I discovered the Portal Gun.
Good times.
I’m actually a fairly new player at 45. My two young kids have gotten into it recently and we have a realm where we play together sometimes. Seeing what they figure out and come up with on their own is fascinating and amazing.
I used to play on (pirated) Pocket Edition on my dad’s phone as a kid, since I couldn’t convince my parents to get Java Edition.
I built an entire city in Creative mode - with a gigantic ice skating rink - and ran around showing it off to anybody that would listen. If I looked back at it these days I’d find that it leaves a lot to be desired, but my dad chucked the phone so I have no way of knowing how good/bad it is beyond my nostalgia-tinted memory.
These days I main survival, redstone, and tech mods. I miss the days when I could build whatever I wanted without my inner critic getting in the way.
The bomb house!
I got a [then] 3~4yo relative who was a big fan of Minecraft, and he was always asking me to build him a house. So I did, in a new creative world. Rigged the whole thing with TNT. Once he stepped on the pressure plate, “tsssssssKABOOOM!”. I thought that he’d take it as a joke, but started crying, partially because his mum was nearby and she was laughing nonstop at it. (I promptly opened a copy of the world, before I rigged it with TNT. “See? It was a joke! Here’s the house, before exploding! No TNT this time, OK?”
He’s a teen now and we still joke about this.
I have a few from playing with friends a few years back. But my favorite is when I accidentally made a dick castle.
Generally my method of building castles is finding a nice big hill or cliff, plopping a few towers along the top, and then connecting them up with a big wall. If it was big enough, it’d be an open court yard in the middle. But in this case, it was just a long hallway connecting 3 towers, with the main tower overlooking a sheer cliff face into the plains below. Majestic, glorious, the perfect spot.
My friend had been heckling me about how the shape was a little phallic, but I scoffed at his observations. After a week of building this thing, and finally getting the roof done over the hallway connecting the towers, my friend made a map. And I could deny it no longer. I spent a week constructing a giant cock n balls, with the head threateningly pointed at the village to the east. The map remained proudly displayed in the entryway to our shared base just south of my castle. To a 15 year old, this was peak comedy.
Later my friend burned it down. I still bring up this betrayal to him sometimes.