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Notch mothballs 0x10c; community team resolve to build it themselves

0x10c_abandoned

Notch put 0x10c on ice in April, citing a creative block – and it’s languished there in the freezer ever since, sharing shelf space with some neglected block of chicken now resembling White Walker meat. The man at Mojang this week confirmed that he has no plans to do anything with his space-and-16-bit-PCs sim, in a glum non-announcement that had the much more positive side effect of spurring a handful of community developers into action.

“Nope, there are no future aspirations for 0x10c,” said Notch during a personal TF2 livestream. “If somebody at the office wants to do it, then yeah – but I’m just going to be working on small games for the rest of my life.”

Let’s move beyond the slightly unsettling realisation that Notch very much could spend the rest of his like building Minicrafts and Shambleses and Drops, and hop straight to the Reddit thread where a group of declared 0x10c fans decided to create the game in his stead.

“I think the main reason we set out to do the project is that we were really excited for 0x10c,” said Nouht, the thread’s creator, to USGamer. “As soon as Notch said he was dropping it, a lot of the community were disappointed. Hearing Notch say there wasn’t going to be a 0x10c on the livestream really shook people up.”

Designated project lead and head writer Shane Dalton added: “I think we didn’t really look into why he put it on hold. We just sort of looked at the project and were like, ‘Okay. This is a community project now’. We’re not using any of his old code, his name or anything.”

The team have already split themselves into a number of ‘departments’, each headed by a lead like Dalton. Once they’ve built a facsimile of Notch’s space base, they’ll bring the community on board for feedback on early builds.

“We’re not planning on monetizing it except for asking for donations to help with server costs,” said Dalton. “It’s also because of the open source nature of the game. We’re going to release the game for free since we want as many people as possible to play this.”

In the couple of years Notch has spent flitting between projects, 0x10c seemed the most likely to prove a successor to Minecraft. A ludicrously ambitious first-person space sim featuring a functioning 16-bit computer, it clearly never became more than proof-of-concept and palette cleanser for its creator.

If you had to choose: 0x10c or 10cc?

Thanks, VG247.