You used to be able to play Minecraft classic directly on minecraft.net

It still exists at https://classic.minecraft.net/

I was confused because I thought Minecraft was originally Java, but that is Javascript. Wikipedia explains:

>On 7 May, 2019, coinciding with Minecraft's 10th anniversary, a JavaScript recreation of an old 2009 Java Edition build named Minecraft Classic was made available to play online for free.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minecraft

Wow! I had no idea, it even supports up to 9 additional players.

The full game was available on minecraft.net for many years. At times it was the only way to play multiplayer when the authentication server would go down.

The phone is ringing—Java Applets called B-)

Fun fact: one of the first versions of Minecraft (the "classic" one) was playable in a web browser. I actually did play it as a young teen and later thought I must have dreamt it, when I couldn't find it anywhere.

It got extended, embraced and extinguished.

Nope, still exists :3 https://classic.minecraft.net/

Not "still". That is not the same game that was on the website when I first got into Minecraft in 2010 but a JavaScript recreation made in 2019.

this is pretty empty

Yeah I remember that. I think it was back in version 1.6 or something. It kinda blew my mind as a kid playing a full-on computer game in a browser.

Only guessing, but I have a theory that Mojang considered that circa 2017 :D

In 2019 they released a web version of minecraft classic, as a quirky marketing thing for the game's anniversary. But what they released turned out to be built on my open-source voxel engine, and when I dug around their code I realized they'd yoinked my engine a solid two years earlier.

And the demo they released was probably not two year's of work, so my theory is that somebody at Mojang investigated the idea of minecraft-but-JS, and made a demo but then decided not to pursue it, and then later on it got recycled for the marketing demo. (which, annoyingly for me, they pretended was an old alpha build of Minecraft instead of a new thing built on open source.)

The demo is still live, though the multiplayer stopped working the same day it launched:

https://classic.minecraft.net/

Humorous postscript, btw: two months after Mojang forked my voxel engine, somebody left an anonymous "this is awful, you are a terrible programmer" comment on the engine repo.

It's probably a total coincidence, but I like to imagine that the comment came from somebody at Mojang, and that my awful code is the reason why minecraft isn't a web app today :D

Is your repo still available?

Yup! Though I haven't touched it in several years:

https://github.com/fenomas/noa

The full java version of the game was ported to webassembly/webgl a while ago. It's called eaglercraft: https://eaglercraft.com

Minor nit - "the full java version of an at-least 8 years old release" (which is necessarily missing -a lot- of what people would consider "Minecraft" these days.)

Minecraft these days is missing a lot of what people would consider "Minecraft" 8 years ago.

I don't get it - isn't this blatant copyright infringement? Seems like they're just running some kind of cracked Minecraft build with a JVM-in-JS layer or some such trickery?

yeah, it's JVM-to-wasm plus an lwjgl-to-webgl library plus various compression packed into a single .html file