It's not correct to attribute the voxel game genre to Minecraft. It's just the first game of the genre to reach a considerable level of success.

Minecraft is just one of many games that were directly inspired by the underground hit Infiniminer.

I fondly remember NovaLogic's Comanche series. While it isn't of the 'world building' genre, its voxel engine was very impressive for its time:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comanche_series

Also interesting (historically) is 'Rescue on Fractalus'. Not just for its cheesy name, but also due to its reliance on fractals to draw 3D mountain sceneries:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rescue_on_Fractalus!

Edit: videos of both games:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Usj17cxSCKs

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FbZ-chrOgGg&feature=playe...

Rescue on Fractalus had one of the most genuinely terrifying game moments of my 'career'. I won't spoil it here, but you can probably guess what it was from the wikipedia page.

Indeed! Spoiler alert:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M8opv5u9nf0

First time (as a kid) was shocking...

Actually the one I was talking about is when the pilot actually gets aboard the ship first!

I love NovaLogic's games and their voxel engine, don't they own several patents on voxel engine based games? I think I remember that coming up in a discussion a few years back on why we haven't seen more voxel games prior to this recent slew(besides hardware liking polygons more).

This recent slew aren't technically voxel games. At least not in the sense of NovaLogic's tech - see: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2447057.

(To add to the confusion, this particular game, Ace of Spades, actually is voxel-rendered.)

It is however thought that John Carmack's next engine after the Rage engine may include honest-to-goodness voxel rendering: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Id_Tech_6

Historically, Carmack has had quite a lot of influence on both the hardware and API vendors, so it will be interesting to see if he can spearhead more mainstream movement towards sparse voxel octree rendering: http://youtu.be/THaam5mwIR8

Infiniminer may have been Notch's inspiration, but Minecraft is what created the genre. People making minecraft-like games right now aren't copying Infiniminer, they're copying minecraft.

The iPhone wasn't the first smart-phone, it wasn't even the first touch-screen smart phone, but most people (correctly) give it credit for popularizing the style, and creating a new "genre" for smartphones.

You are using the word created wrong. Infiniminer created the genre; Minecraft popularized the genre.

Why not? If it’s the one that made it popular then it’s the one that created the genre.

Edit: Well, ok, I don't want to put it in such absolute terms. But I do think that Minecraft deserves quite a large chunk of attribution for the genre.

Is Minecraft Voxel? I thought it was real (if blocky) 3D?

Calling Minecraft "voxel" is sure to introduce confusion. The representation of the map is simply a regular 3D grid of block IDs. When we use the exact same type of regular grid to represent 2D maps, we do not call the grid cells "pixels", so I don't think it's very informative to call these "voxels".

Minecraft is also not a voxel renderer. Voxel renderers typically work by casting rays against the grid. Minecraft draws the blocks with rasterized triangles, using a hardware-accelerated 3D API (LWJGL), just like almost every other 3D game.

In other words, there is practically no interesting overlap between what NovaLogic was doing, and what Minecraft does.

It's a 3D approximation of Voxels...

Indeed. I can't wait to see someone building an RTS using this. Imagine how awesome TA would be if you could alter terrain on the fly!

Then you should go and check TA Spring. It has all the good stuff from TA + modern graphics engine + terrain changing mechanics.

I remember this epic duel I played vs 2 other guys (yes my teammate quit) in a castle type map. Since I turtled too heavily for them to break through, eventually they just drowned me by blasting me with arty long enough for map's floor to erode beyond water level.

That sounds cool, but if I play a game I'm usually going for single-player. Does Spring have a useful AI yet?

There are a few, some quite novel, and they're getting better. For example, one of the new ones exploits the computer's ability to individually micro dozens of scouts to repeatedly pwn your mexes at the beginning of the game.

Sorry wouldn't know, I don't care much for AI in RTS games.