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Markus "Notch" Persson just as startled as you are that Cliffhorse is his first commercial game since Minecraft

by: Randy -
More On: Cliffhorse

You're a brown and white horse. You have a brown and white ball. There's a mountainous landscape dotted with grasses and palm trees. You can climb anything.

This is Cliffhorse. It's Markus "Notch" Persson's second official commercial game. The first was Minecraft. While Cliffhorse is a quote-unquote commercial game, there's nothing to buy, and it's deep in alpha land. You can download it right now, but Persson makes no promise of further updates. 

There's no sound, no soundtrack, and no stated objective. There's no score, no enemies, and no allies. The only decisions to make are: (1) how long before I get bored kicking this ball around, and (2) how long before I get bored scaling these mountains. The answer to both may be: about 10 minutes. Once, I jumped off the edge of the furthest cliff into the blue and had to restart my frozen computer.

While Persson states that this is his first commercial game since Minecraft, he's worked on other products since that particular 2011 sandbox blockbuster. He's started and shelved 0x10c, a space...shooter? Maybe? He kicked off production of collectible card game, Scrolls, then handed off production to Jakob Porsér after Bethesda wouldn't settle a trademark-infringement lawsuit by way of Quake 3 tournament. And he's participated in Ludum Dare 48-hour game jams, which resulted in Breaking the Tower, Metagun, Prelude of the Chambered, and Minicraft.

So I'm not exactly sure what makes Cliffhorse his second commercial release, except for the fact that you can send him a donation in Dogecoins (goodness gracious), so there you go.