Kotaku reader and Minecraft player Roman DeNu delivers a retro gaming Christmas present, completely recreating the over world from The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past with the building blocks Notch provided. Who wants a video walkthrough?

This is an excellent example of what folks with too much free time and a deep love of classics Nintendo gaming can accomplish in Minecraft. Roman spent 108 hours and 59 minutes (he counted!) building this 512 by 512 by 104 block masterpiece, and he has plans to continue the project with a complete reproduction of the Dark World and all of the buildings, caves, and dungeons from the game.

This is love, ladies and gentleman, and Christmas is all about sharing the love. Thanks, Roman!

Owen Good — Let's Close Out April Fool's With This Unbeatable Minecraft Office PrankLet's Close Out April Fool's With This Unbeatable Minecraft Office Prank Closing out this April Fool's Day is a prank that is 100 percent truthful in its awesomeness. At Ann Arbor, Mich.-based Greenview Data, the co-workers of one Minecraft-addicted employee, Matt, converted his cubicle into a Minecraft cave anyone could be proud of, in game or in real life.

It wasn't as simple as taking 62 boxes and painting them with grass and stone textures (though the textures are well done); support mechanisms also had to be built in. They were in the office to nearly 11 p.m. assembling and documenting their work. You can see more still shots and read details of the cave's construction at the link below.

Matt's reaction is a little subdued. What speaks loudest, however, is "I'm keepin' it." We would too. Hats off to Matt and to his co-workers. That's an office that plainly knows how to have fun, and if Matt was worth this much trouble, he must be a great guy to work with, too.

New Office for Matt - Boxcraft? [Greenview Data, thanks Jeff O.]

Responding to a question on a Reddit "ask me anything" thread, Minecraft creator Markus Persson said that his mega-popular indie brainchild has already earned $33 million dollars in revenue from over 1.8 million paid downloads. Via [Gamasutra]

Michael McWhertor — Minecraft Has An Official Release DateNo longer must one play Minecraft and constantly wonder "When is this game finally going to come out?!" The mega-hit world-building indie game now has an official release date: November 11, 2011.

Markus "Notch" Persson writes on his official blog that his company, Mojang, decided on the release date for Minecraft, which has been in beta since December, at a board meeting that touched on the status and direction of the company. Notch explains the trickiness (and purpose) of attaching a release date to a game like the always-in-development Minecraft.

    It's a bit tricky to really do a release for Minecraft as we keep updating it all the time. For one, the version we deem as the "full version" won't be very different at all from what the game was like a week ago, and we'll keep adding features after the release as well, so it's really more of a milestone when we finally get rid of the Beta label, and some kind of goal for us to work towards. The plan is to be open with this and try to get people to cheer us on as much as possible, but to be open with the fact that the game won't change much at the actual release day.

Notch and crew will be competing with another big game on 11/11/11, Bethesda's The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim. Yes, it is totally on.

11/11/11 [The Word of Notch]

Minecraft And The G-Man, Together For CharityThere's currently a battle going on over on the site of the Humble Indie Bundle, where two indies who have "made it big" - Minecraft creator Notch and Garry's Mod creator Garry Newman - are jostling to see who can donate the most money.

Accuse them of showboating if you will, but since proceeds from the sale of the bundle go to the indie developers behind the games, think of them as Robin Hoods. Without the stealing. Unless you count the tussle as them stealing from each other.

What must surely be making all those on the receiving end of the bundle's cash happy is that although the pair could easily adjust their initial donations of $2,000 to "win", they're instead throwing down fresh $2,000.01 and $2,000.02 donations.

In honour of all that indie cash being thrown around like it was going out of style, then, Wolfire concept artist Aubrey Serr whipped up this image honouring the two and sent it over. And it's about the best thing I saw on the internet today.

Minecraft developer and publisher Mojang Specifications has ridden the game’s wave of popularity to success.  Now the developer is looking to give other independent developers a hand with publishing their own titles.  Mojang’s business development director Daniel Kaplan let GI.biz in on the things brewing behind the scenes.

“We are in a great spot right now, we can basically do whatever we want to. The hardest thing for us right now is to say 'no' to all the deals we're being offered. There are tons of opportunities out there for us right now. But we have to wait it out and figure out what's the best thing for us to do,” said Kaplan. “We get requests every week, it's quite hard to sort them out, to figure out, okay, this is what we're going to do. If you take one path then you can't take the other, you know?”

“We're looking into publishing our own games too though, bringing indie games under our own brand. We're still having to figure out how that's going to work out. We hope to have something out this fall at least, some co-published games,” Kaplan teased.

Mojang is still focused on Minecraft, but it’s also working on a second title, Scrolls.

“The biggest team is the Scrolls team, but that's just three people, it's still very small. We like to work in small teams, because we believe we can make decisions faster, or have shorter meetings, more creative freedom for the teams. But the focus is still really Minecraft, that's the core business right now,” he added.

Indie smash hit Minecraft has surpasse 10 million registered users, according to creator Markus "Notch" Persson, with over a quarter of those paying for the game.

The 10 million free registration mark was surpassed Friday, according to official statistics. Of the 10,008,005 registered users recorded at press time, 2,675,185 -- nearly 27 percent -- have purchased the game.

Minecraft surpassed one million customers in roughly seven months, and has grown even faster since then.

A Kinect-enabled version of the game for Xbox 360 is in the works, as is a mobile version. While both iOS and Android versions have been announced, its mobile debut will be on the Anroid, via the Xperia Play.

The online game, which encourages player creativity, is still in beta.

Late last week Minecraft mastermind "Notch" weighed in on Bill S.978 (a bill that would make steaming certain material illegal and punishable with a felony charge). Notch expressed his disdain with the law and worried that people who make "let’s plays" and "speed run" videos of gameplay for YouTube might get in some unwarranted legal trouble.

He also said that if this law passes he will make sure that the terms of service for his game Minecraft includes a clause to deal with it. Here is Notch's statement in its entirety:

"I’ve received a few emails about Bill S.978, a new bill proposed in the USA, which would make it illegal under certain circumstances to share videos of copyrighted materials over the internet. The problem is that it appears to also make it illegal to upload videos of games, such as let’s plays and speed runs. And I love watching let’s plays and speed runs.

Here’s a great video on the subject I found via Reddit: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ib7-vSrp6y8

If the bill passes, I suspect many game companies (including us) will add a special clause to the TOS specifically to allow posting videos of their games. A huge part of why Minecraft has grown so fast is the YouTube community."

If the promise of 24/7 board gaming extravaganzas and endless 3DS StreetPass swapping aren't enough to get PAX Prime attendees excited about the event, perhaps this will: Notch has announced that Minecraft's Adventure Update will be playable on the show floor. The expansion, which is still largely under wraps, will tack over 40 new features onto the game, including NPC villages, additional farming opportunities and randomly-generated dungeons.

For those who didn't snag tickets to the sold-out, late-August convention, don't fret too much -- we can only assume the line for Mojang's booth is going to wrap around the expo hall like an anaconda. Your time would be better spent actually playing regular Minecraft and building a complex machine to do all that Adventuring for you.

Minecraft fans are eagerly awaiting the upcoming Adventure Update and its promise of a more traditional game structure. We’ve known that the update will include some sort of XP system, but a recent interview with the game’s creator reveals some surprising information on how it will function.

Speaking with PC Gamer, Markus “Notch” Persson reveals that when a player dies in Minecraft, all of their XP and levels will reset to zero.

“I’m a big roguelike fan,” Notch told PC Gamer. “It’s really fun. The idea is that you level up really, really fast. You can grind away and level up fast if you want to, or you can just play as normal and level up that way. The longer you play, the bigger the risk of dying becomes. It’s the part that really works. If it feels like it’s too harsh, we might make it half or something like that. But the fact that you lose everything – you lose all your inventory anyways.”

Notch also admitted that he’s not sure how leveling up will work yet, but that the company is looking at an automated XP system. I’m looking forward to trying out the new mode as much as the next guy, though the added penalty to dying isn’t exactly going to help me overcome my fear of creepers anytime soon.

You know those blocky zombies that attack at night in Minecraft? Markus “Notch” Persson wants to make the nocturnal attacks more unnerving, and has released a screenshot of what to expect: creatures with long, narrow limbs that are very slow and actually pick blocks up and move them around.

According to Persson himself: "I made it passive until you looked straight at it. (…) You could walk up to these beasts (they’re three meters tall) and watch them as they moved their blocks around, but as soon as you happened to look straight at them, they’d attack. And by “straight at them”, I mean putting the reticle on top of them. You can keep them visible on screen and actually look straight at them in real life, but as soon as your in game character looks straight at them, boom."

The "Endermen", as Notch calls them, will attack you when you look away: "To really drive home the point of looking at them being bad, I made the Endermen freeze and turn towards you when you look at them. As long as you look straight at them, they stand perfectly still and look straight at you. As soon as you look away, they will run (very fast) towards you.

We have a name: the Endermen. I can only image the feeling of dread players will have once they lock eyes with this mob, knowing that once they look away, their end is nigh.

And they teleport. If they’re too far away to reach you in a short period of time, they will teleport about once per second."

Think of Samara from The Ring with living Wicker Men, and there you have it.

Rather than setting its convention in the icy grip of its home country's chilly November, Sweden-based Minecraft studio Mojang Specifications is holding what it dubs "MineCon" in Las Vegas. "For me, MineCon is about celebrating the full release of Minecraft," Mojang head Markus "Notch" Persson told PC Gamer this week. Apparently the delayed title will see its full launch in grand style, with Notch "getting up on stage and pushing the button to upload the final build."

When he first spitballed the idea back in May, voters overwhelmingly responded, "No, definitely not" when asked whether they'd attend such an event. That said, the minority's 42,000 votes were assuredly enough to convince him of demand for such an event.

Speaking of, Las Vegas' Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino will host MineCon on November 18 and 19, and the ticket registration site is set to go live next week -- apparently Notch will announce as much on his Twitter account, so keep an eye out. That is, if you can tear yourself away from building that to-scale replica of Hogwarts.

Update: This year marks the second MineCon.

In January, Minecraft passed its first major sales milestone: 1 million downloads. Three months later, in April, it clocked another cool million. And today, just five days into August, the game has surpassed its 3 millionth paid user -- every four months, eh? Smells like a trend!

Those 3,000,961 folks (as of this writing) make up over a full quarter of all accounts at 26.24 percent. At around $22 per purchase, that's quite a bit of dough -- and with no publisher to pay. We imagine Mojang Specifications head Markus "Notch" Persson will be investing a good chunk of that dough in the upcoming MineCon, which kicks off the official launch of Minecraft on November 18.

[Thanks, Matias.]

Markus “Notch” Persson recently let the world know that he was being sued by Bethsoft. The creator of Minecraft doesn't seem that broken up about the situation, and detailed it in his blog.

“First of all, I love Bethesda. I assume this nonsense is partly just their lawyers being lawyers, and a result of trademark law being the way it is,” said Persson. “About half a year ago, our lawyers recommended us to register 'Minecraft' as a trademark, so we did. I had voted against it initially, but we did it anyway. Better safe than sorry, and all that. At the same time, we also applied for 'Scrolls', the new game we’re working on. We knew of no similarly named games, and we had even googled it to make sure. I’m not even sure if you CAN trademark individual words, like 'Scrolls', but we sent in the application anyway.”

“A while later, out of the blue, we got contacted by Bethesda’s lawyers,” added Persson. “They wanted to know more about the 'Scrolls' trademark we were applying for, and claimed it conflicted with their existing trademark 'The Elder Scrolls'. I agree that the word 'Scrolls' is part of that trademark, but as a gamer, I have never ever considered that series of (very good) role playing games to be about scrolls in any way, nor was that ever the focal point of neither their marketing nor the public image.”

He noted that saying you can own the rights to the individual words within a trademark is “scary.” He didn't think they had much of a case, but still offered to never put words in front of 'Scrolls' and suggested expansions like 'Scrolls - The Banana Expansion' though he isn't sure Bethsoft ever got back to him on this.

“Today, I got a 15-page letter from some Swedish lawyer firm, saying they demand us to stop using the name Scrolls, that they will sue us (and have already paid the fee to the Swedish court), and that they demand a pile of money up front before the legal process has even started,” said Persson. “I assume this is all some more or less automated response to us applying for the trademark. I sincerely hope Bethesda isn’t pulling a Tim Langdell.”

Bethsoft has also had a long legal battle with Interplay over various MMO rights associated with the Fallout brand and has not been very successful in wresting the rights away from Interplay.

Recognize the above logo? It's the title of the upcoming card-based role-playing game from Mojang Specifications, the studio founded by Minecraft creator Markus "Notch" Persson. Apparently Bethesda Softworks and/or their corporate lawyers think it infringes upon their ownership of the phrase The Elder Scrolls, the name of their open-world, first-person RPG franchise. A couple weeks ago, Notch was served with a cease and desist letter, demanding a lump sum of money and threatening legal action if the name was not immediately changed.

Notch thinks he's in the right, but the issue hasn't solved itself since then. Following getting married last weekend, he admits the only bad thing going on for him right now is this "trademark lawsuit nonsense," but he's figured out a way to settle it once and for all: 3v3 Quake III match, winner take all.

    Remember that scene in Game of Thrones where Tyrion chose a trial by battle in the Eyrie? Well, let’s do that instead! I challenge Bethesda to a game of Quake 3. Three of our best warriors against three of your best warriors. We select one level, you select the other, we randomize the order. 20 minute matches, highest total frag count per team across both levels wins.

    If we win, you drop the lawsuit.

    If you win, we will change the name of Scrolls to something you’re fine with.

    Regardless of the outcome, we could still have a small text somewhere saying our game is not related to your game series in any way, if you wish.

    I am serious, by the way.