With less than week until it's official launch, Minecraft has officially gone gold. Notch tweeted earlier, "So, yes, Minecraft has gone gold. :D" The much-anticipated day is finally here for a game that has technically been available for over two years, but not as a "full" version. Up until now the game had been considered in development and Beta is only continuously updated versions of the game.
The official Minecraft release coincides with MineCon – a dedicated convention to all things Minecraft and Mojang. The convention, which takes place this Friday and Saturday will feature Minecraft for Xbox 360, Mojang's new game Scrolls, and the full release of Minecraft for PC where it looks like Mojang will be handing out USB drives with the updated Minecraft Release Candidate 1. Notch tweeted this photo earlier with the subtitle, "Minecraft 1.0". Notch explained, "The flash drives is for installing it on a pile of computers at Minecon."
Although, fans don't necessarily have to wait until Friday to get their hands on the full release copy of Minecraft. Yesterday, Notch released Minecraft release candidate 1.0, which was promptly updated to Release Candidate 2.0 once developer Jens Bergensten realized RC1 was an invalid build and uploaded incorrectly. Despite the mixup, it is still technically being considered Release Candidate 1.
The launch of the official "full" game of Minecraft doesn't necessarily mean the end of the game, or updates. Both Notch and Jens have confirmed they will continue to update Minecraft after the release this weekend. Jens specified, "We will have to update more carefully, so it will be major updates with many prereleases."
If that's truly how the process will work then fans can expect updates similar to the most recent Update 1.9 which just had version 6 released.
Regardless of updates, it looks like Minecraft has the go-ahead for production and fans should begin seeing it finally hit store shelves.
