0x10c

» see 0x10c.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

In December 2011 Markus Persson announced he was stepping down as lead developer of Minecraft to work on something else. In March 2012, collecting a special award from BAFTA, he said there were three projects in play and he had not chosen. Days later he told PC Gamer it would be a space game built out of Firefly and Elite. The first real details arrived through an April Fool's joke site called Mars Effect, a swipe at the Bethesda trademark suit that was hanging over Mojang at the time, and then on 3 April 2012 the game got its actual name.

The name is a number. 0x is the hexadecimal prefix every programmer reads without thinking about it, and 10 to the power C in hexadecimal is 16 to the twelfth, which comes out at 281,474,976,710,656. That is how many years pass in the story. Deep sleep cells sold in 1988 had a bug in them and ran about 281 trillion years too long, and the game starts when people begin waking up. Persson said he pronounced it "ten to the see" and that everyone else could do what they liked.

The rest of the feature list was a space sandbox of the expected shape, with mining and trading in it and a single universe shared between the solo and multiplayer modes. And then there was the computer.

~ the dossier ~

~ the dcpu-16 ~

Every ship in 0x10c was to contain a working emulated 16-bit processor, the DCPU-16, reachable from any monitor on board. It came with a published instruction set and documented peripherals, and it could load external programs written outside the game. The specification was open enough that the community could write their own emulators against it, and did so within days.

This is the part that traveled outside the game's audience. I am a computer engineer and I have no particular attachment to Minecraft, but a hand written spec for a small imaginary machine is a document that circulates through every office where people write firmware. The DCPU-16 got read and argued about by people who had no intention of ever buying the game. Some of them wrote assemblers for it. A few of those repositories are still on GitHub.

~ the block ~

The first gameplay video went up on the game's site on 13 October 2012 and the first multiplayer test was streamed on Twitch on the 26th. Then it slowed. In an April 2013 interview with Polygon, Persson said development had hit a creative road block and was on hold, but that he was bringing in another developer to make sure the game got made.

On 13 August 2013, in the middle of a Team Fortress 2 livestream, he said it was shelved indefinitely and that someone else at Mojang could pick it up if they wanted to. On the 19th he wrote it out properly: the motivation had drained gradually, so much effort had gone into planning and designing the thing that it sucked the fun out of the project, and what he wanted now was to make small things again. Microsoft bought Mojang thirteen months later and nobody picked it up.

~ what got built anyway ~

A fan project called Trillek formed to build the game Persson had described, and like most projects of that kind it produced more forum threads than executable. The DCPU-16 outlived all of it. The specification repositories, the emulators, the assemblers and the little test programs people wrote for a processor in a game that was never released are still sitting there, which is a peculiar artifact to leave behind: a complete machine with nothing to run on.

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