Sam's website

Welcome to my Minecraft shrine!

My history with Minecraft

Early childhood

Some of my earliest memories are of playing Minecraft. The earliest one I can think of is when I was 6, and my parents got my brother and I an iPad (I know, I know). It must've been the first iPad Mini model, and it had this huge purple rubber case with a handle. My brother was 2 at the time, so for the next couple years, this thing was all mine. I remember that I only had a couple games on it, because my parents mostly wanted me to use it to read on the Kindle app, but one of those games was Minecraft: Pocket Edition. At the time Minecraft: PE was in v0.4.0 alpha, which was a very early version of it. It looked pretty different then than it does now.

This is a screenshot someone else took of Minecraft: Pocket Edition in 2012. The world cut off at 255x255 blocks, and you can see the edge of the world in this screenshot. There was no hunger bar yet, and you could only have 3 items in your hotbar.

I remember that the first time I played, I was extremely entranced by the Nether reactor core blocks. I didn't have any way to know about what a Nether reactor was, so I built an entire house out of the blocks, just thinking they were pretty.

I dropped the game for a couple years when my family and I moved to France. During the time I wasn't playing the game, though, I was watching it plenty on Youtube. My favorites were iBallisticSquid, LDShadowlady, StacyPlays, and, of course, StampyLongNose. I remember hiding my iPad under my pillow and staying up past my bedtime to watch their let's plays. One time, I did something to upset my parents and had my iPad taken away, and they deleted Safari off of my iPad (probably the smart move), which is what I used to watch YouTube. I hand-wrote them a letter begging them to let me have YouTube installed so I could keep up with SalemsLady M and AmyLee33's My Little Pony mod let's play series.

The thumbnail of the first episode of the MLP mod let's play.

In fifth grade, my grandparents moved from California to a town nearby mine. I spent a lot of time at their house, because my parents were pretty busy with work. A couple houses down from my grandparents, there was this family with two kids. I don't remember their names, but one was a boy and one was a girl... maybe they were twins? Anyways, I would go over to their house a lot to play with their pets, and more interestingly to this shrine, play Minecraft with them on their Xbox 360. I have one really vivid memory of them showing me how to build this player launcher, where you'd make a 5x5 obsidian square with a 1-block platform in the middle, fill it with flowing water, and light TNT in the 3x3 square around the middle. If I made it now, I probably wouldn't be so impressed with how high it launches you, but to 10-year-old me, it was incredible. I made them launch my player again and again.