The First Night: Punching Trees by Torchlight

Everyone remembers their first night. You punch a tree, fashion crude tools, and as the blocky sun sinks you dig a hole in a hillside and listen to the groaning dark outside. Minecraft's survival loop is the oldest story there is — shelter against the night — rendered in cubes, and it became the best-selling video game in history.

Markus Persson's creation, shepherded to its 2011 release by Mojang, is less a game than a set of toy blocks with weather. Its procedurally generated worlds stretch further than any player could walk, and its redstone circuitry lets the patient build working computers inside their own game. Children learned logic from it; architects sketched in it; classrooms taught with it.

And it is, at heart, profoundly cozy. The torch-lit cabin, the fenced garden, the tamed wolf by the fire, C418's piano drifting over the hills. Minecraft understood that given a world and a warm light, players will build not just houses but homes — and then invite their friends over to see them.