Minecraft: Story Mode

~ the obituary ~

Telltale Games released the first episode of Minecraft: Story Mode on 13 October 2015, made together with Mojang. It took the one game famous for having no story at all and gave it a hero, Jesse, a group of friends and a world-ending monster to stop, told in Telltale's usual format of episodes released a month or two apart.

In October 2015 I was thirty-one and working as an engineer, and Minecraft was something I knew from the outside, mostly through the tech news a year earlier when Microsoft bought Mojang for $2.5 billion. A point-and-click story set inside it was clearly made for a younger audience than me. A reader wrote in to ask for it here, so this is built from Telltale's and Mojang's own announcements and from the coverage at the time.

The first season ran eight episodes, the last one in September 2016. A second season of five episodes followed between July and December 2017. By then it was on eleven platforms, from PlayStation and Xbox to Wii U, iPhone and Apple TV.

~ the case file ~

~ choices on a timer ~

The format was the one Telltale built with The Walking Dead. You walk around a little, then a conversation starts and you pick a line from four before a bar runs out, and the game tells you that a character "will remember that". Jesse could be played as a boy voiced by Patton Oswalt or a girl voiced by Catherine Taber. Ashley Johnson played Petra and Brian Posehn played Axel, with Corey Feldman and Paul Reubens turning up as guests.

~ september 2018 ~

On 21 September 2018 Telltale announced a "majority studio closure" and let go about ninety percent of its staff. Around twenty five people stayed on to finish the obligations the company still had, and one of them was an interactive version of Story Mode for Netflix, where viewers picked Jesse's choices with the remote. The first three episodes appeared on Netflix on 27 November 2018 and the last two in December. A few weeks earlier, on 11 October, Telltale had started the assignment proceedings that wound the company up.

~ the delisting ~

In June 2019 Mojang posted the notice, on behalf of the publisher: both seasons "will no longer be supported on June 25th, 2019." Owners were told to "download all remaining episodes prior to the service being discontinued". After that date the game could not be bought anywhere, and on most stores even people who had already paid could not download the episodes again. Episodes already installed kept working. GOG was the one exception and let its buyers keep their installers.

When a new company bought the Telltale name and most of its assets in August 2019, Story Mode was not part of the revival, and Mojang had already said it had no plans to take it over. Netflix removed its version on 5 December 2022, the first time it took down one of its interactive specials. Our reader remembers a third season being canceled. I could not find one that was ever announced. Telltale's known canceled projects were a Game of Thrones sequel and a Stranger Things game.

credit to Sups1234, who wrote in about the delisting, and our thanks for it.

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