0x10c: Minecraft Developer Notch’s Next Game Will Be A MMO Space Epic
In the world of indie gaming, Minecraft is undoubtedly in a league of its own. The sandbox game has already sold more than 5 million copies and has spawned its own subculture of fan sites and clones. Now, the game’s creator Notch (nee Markus Persson), has announced his next project called 0x10c: a multi-player space game set in 281,474,976,712,644 AD. Besides the usual space battles, trading and mining we have come to expect from these kinds of games, 0x10c will also feature a fully functioning emulated 16 bit CPU that will control your spaceship and which will be fully programmable by the player.
As if having a programmable computer at the core of the game wasn’t enough, 0x10c has what must be one of gaming’s geekiest premises: the reason it is set in 281,474,976,712,644 AD is due to the simple fact that in 0x10c’s parallel universe, the space race never ended and that a computer bug in a new “deep sleep cell” introduced in 1988 caused a large number of people to sleep for 0x0001 0000 0000 0000 years instead of the planned 0x0000 0000 0000 0001 years.
In a way, this feels like the natural next step up from Minecraft. While Notch’s first game was built around mining and “crafting” tools (with some multi-player options thrown in for the hardcore fans), this new game takes this concept further by offering users a bigger world to play in and even more customization options through the built-in programmable computers. It’s worth noting that users will also be able to share their programs, which will surely give rise to a whole new real-world ecosystem around the game and, as Notch himself acknowledges, maybe even viruses.