Minecraft briefly hits the App Store, then quickly pulled

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Despite the fact that it’s one of the best games the Mac has to offer, we’ve never talked about Minecraft here at Cult of Mac. Let’s remedy that, shall we?

What is Minecraft? It’s so much more than what it looks like at first: a crude world builder with equally crude 3D graphics. But it’s so much more than that.

As I’ve described it before:

Imagine a world made entirely of blocks, each a three-dimensional pixel… a voxel. It has mountains and trees and seas and animals and rivers of lava, but all of these exist in a universe in which Euclidean geometry past the cube is as arcane and impenetrable as it would be in Flatland. When I chop down a tree, or hew coal out of a mountain, or scoop water out of a lake in Minecraft, it comes out in a perfect, self-sustained cube. And that’s all that Minecraft ultimately is: you hack cubes out of an infinite world to craft items or build enormous, physics-defying structures.

But it’s more than just that. Play Minecraft and youl find yourself fending off hordes of the undead at night, or traveling through inter-dimensional slip spaces. In Minecraft, you might make yourself a castle that floats on the clouds, or a gigantic, labyrinth-sized 16-bit computer, or a scale model of the USS Enterprise.

Without a doubt, Minecraft is one of the most imaginative and wide-reaching games you can play on your Mac, and at only $10, it’s a steal to boot. Go get it now if you haven’t already.

Believe it or not, that gushing enthusiasm was just the prologue to the post. Because Minecraft is built on Java, I’d been hopeful for awhile that the creator would get around to porting Minecraft over to the iPhone… which is why I immediately leaped to my feet and shouted eureka when I saw TUAW mention that a Minecraft app had been posted to the App Store.

My excitement wasn’t to last for long, though. Apparently the app, which was called Minecrafted, was completely unofficial, and the app programmer hadn’t contacted the creators of Minecraft for official approval before the app went live. In the blink of an eye, it was gone, long before I could actually download it.

Still, it’s worth looking on the bright side here: at the very least, some programmer has proven that Minecraft can successfully be ported to iOS. Minecraft‘s creator has always been a very nice, conscientious guy who listens to the fans, so perhaps this little experiment will ultimately prompt him to undertake the port himself, or give an official blessing to Minecrafted?

Let’s hope so. In the meantime, if you haven’t already, go buy a copy of Minecraft to show your support. Who knows? Maybe your sale will give Notch an incentive to bring his game to the App Store sooner rather than later.

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