This afternoon Corey Peters suddenly yelped and jumped out of his chair claiming that a Creeper had gotten into the new training map he was working on and that it was blocking his ability to get any work done. This was followed a few minutes later by Jon Lippincott claiming he couldn't finish up his code because he had run out of Iron Ore. Even as I write this I can hear Dave Riller telling a story about how he beat a sheep to death with his bare hands to make a new set of pants and a woolly hat.







It seems, dear friends, that our development team has succumbed to Minecraft addiction.



Minecraft is an amazing little (read: freaking huge) world building sandbox game by Markus Persson, aka Notch...the very same Notch that developed Left4kDead a couple years ago. In Minecraft you carve out your own little empire in the wild, building just about whatever you want while the natural world tries to slaughter you every nightfall. The game's box-like representation of reality is cute and definitely charming...until a horde of cute box-like skeletons rip your cute little box-like arms from your cute little box-like body in a spray of cute little box-like blood and gore.



Yes, you should play this game.



Apparently we aren't the only ones to fall prey to the lures of Minecraft. A number of you in The Community have also discovered the game and, as we have come to expect, you immediately went out and imported it into our game, Team Fortress 2.



Check out this Payload Race map developed by some Minecraft fans:







I have a feeling we'll be "playtesting" this map once it's available.



You can check out the latest updates for Minecraft by reading Notch's Blog.



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