Yep, I remember people playing this in class when you could only place a couple of blocks and nothing more.<p>The whole concept of "block building" was new at the time, which I think is why it's hard to imagine why it was so cool back then. It's so ubiquitous now.<p>Markus is also a really interesting guy, despite perhaps some of his controversy. I spoke with him a few times on social media, where he talked about implementing the Minecraft tessellator in a single day, and that he took interest in some of the NES dev tooling I was working on.<p>Cool find! Brought back memories.
I remember playing the web demo and being absolutely captivated. I must have been around 11.<p>Still like the game, though I feel that since starting around 1.8, the magic has been lost a little. More recently, with Microsoft apparently adding everything to the game that someone's 6 year old said would be cool, it's lost a lot of its charm. Imagine taking Chess and adding 10 new types of pawn with special abilities - thats cool, sure, but it kinda makes away with a lot of why the original game was so good.
The classic TIGSource Forums thread created one day earlier (unless there is some timezone-confusion going on):<p><a href="https://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=6273.0" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=6273.0</a><p>"The main inspiration for this game is Infiniminer, but it's going to move in a more Dwarf Fortress way, gameplay wise."<p>(Maybe there is some archived version somewhere that has more images? It is a bit sad to read it now with so many broken image links.)