Yep, I remember people playing this in class when you could only place a couple of blocks and nothing more.

The whole concept of "block building" was new at the time, which I think is why it's hard to imagine why it was so cool back then. It's so ubiquitous now.

Markus is also a really interesting guy, despite perhaps some of his controversy. I spoke with him a few times on social media, where he talked about implementing the Minecraft tessellator in a single day, and that he took interest in some of the NES dev tooling I was working on.

Cool find! Brought back memories.