You spawn into a new world with nothing to start and wonder “What do I want to do first?” As the day goes on you find yourself building beautiful structures, a full scale White House, a huge mansion with 80 floors and an enormous pool. Sounds fun, right? If only there was a game that allowed this. Oh wait, there is, and it’s called Minecraft.

Minecraft is a sandbox video game created in May of 2009 and designed by Swedish game designer Markus Persson, and later fully developed and published by Mojang, a Swedish game developing and publishing company. At the beginning of 2017, Minecraft topped 122 million copies sold worldwide spanning over four different platforms, PC, PlayStation, XBox and mobile. Over the course of 2016, minecraft averaged 53,000 copies sold every day.

Minecraft has been around for about nine years and game developers have no doubt used it as a building block to games that have been developed since.

It’s clear Minecraft has sold many copies and is one of the most sold game in PC history, according to Mojang, because it gives the player unlimited access to the world. When you first load up a new world, everything within its 32 million meter-wide and 256 meter-tall land is yours to explore and build. Any player can build whatever they want, which opens the creative side of the brain, whereas all other games focus on reflex and hand-eye coordination.

But if you do not want to open the creative side of your mind and want to survive, Minecraft also allows that. With survival mode, you can focus on survival and gathering resources. That’s not to say the game allows you to have an easy survival experience. It doesn’t. Whether it be surviving mobs, or just exploring the vast landscape, Minecraft always has something to do.

The game is also built for everyone and has already influenced the gaming scene as we know it. Take a look at the new Assassins Creed or the new God of War coming out this year, or even Call of Duty WWII. What do all these games have in common? A crafting system, just like Minecraft. The game that is centered around crafting and building to survive- Minecraft- has now lead to the creation of other games which involve crafting and building to survive.

Minecraft has influenced the gaming world so much that games are including some of its basic mechanics into their own games and that’s because kids that have grown to be game developers grew up playing this game. With Minecraft approaching its ninth year of existence, we all need to appreciate what this game has done for the rest of the gaming community.