Minecraft: Pi Edition Brings Mojang’s World Building Game To The Raspberry Pi For Free

Today on the Mojang blog, the developer announced general availability of Minecraft: Pi Edition, a version of Minecraft designed specifically to run on the open source Raspberry Pi computer. The version is completely free and was originally announced late last year as an effort to get kids more interested in the kind of exploratory programming the Pi can offer.

Minecraft: Pi allows players to interact with it in the usual way, but it also supports a variety of programming languages so that players can get much more involved with editing the game’s code. That gives it more flexibility than you’ll find in the paid consumer shipping versions of Minecraft, in a package that’s completely free to run on $35 Raspberry Pi hardware.

The version missed its initial planned launch date, but that was because porting Minecraft to the Raspberry Pi proved more difficult than originally thought. Despite delays, the arrival of this software on the platform once again expands the possibilities for the platform created by Eben Upton and his team. A lot of the innovative uses we see involve hardware hacks, but this is a change that should give some kids their first crack at seeing what’s involved in game development from the ground up.