Minecraft

Minecraft Classic is the version of Minecraft that used to run in a browser window, restored and re-released by Mojang, and it still runs in the browser — no download, no account, no install.

It is the 2009 game, not a demo of the modern one. The world is a small generated landscape of grass, dirt, stone, sand and water, and there is no survival loop at all: no hunger, no health, no mobs hunting you, no crafting table to open. The entire experience is creative mode in its purest form — walk up to the terrain and remove it, or place blocks and build something out of it.

The block palette along the bottom is small and instantly readable, which is the point. There is nothing to unlock and nothing to grind for, so the game turns into whatever you decide to make in the space you have. For anyone who has only played the modern version, the absence of everything else is the interesting part.

Multiplayer is built in, though the official public server is frequently busy; single-player works immediately. It runs on WebGL, so a reasonably modern browser is all that is required.

On cool games spot this page is the index entry: cover, description, and search terms. The game itself is loaded from an official third-party web build in an iframe on Play, so nothing is bundled into the site. It is filed under io and tagged minecraft, so it appears alongside the rest of the sandbox and multiplayer games in the catalog.

Press Play and find out.