Minecraft (2009)
When Markus "Notch" Persson released the first version of Minecraft in 2009, he allowed people to play for free and asked dedicated fans to cough up a small fee for the "indev" version, where he rolled out new updates. Before long its success took over his life. In 2014, he sold the company that owned and continued to develop Minecraft, Mojang, to Microsoft for $2.5 billion. Unfortunately he then retired to live out his days in a Hollywood mansion tweeting increasingly deranged things at his millions of followers, but for all his latter-day sins, the game that he left behind remains one of the most influential since Mario Bros.
Do we really need to explain Minecraft? You are dropped into a procedurally generated world and encouraged to gather resources and craft things out of the terrain, which it turns out is built out of unassailably cute little 3D cubes. Some people work together on the same server, building everything from cathedrals to spaceships, while others dig around solo, juggling survival and creation across endless days and nights.
Minecraft itself has been ported to every platform imaginable and spawned numerous extensions, like Story Mode, while its general gameplay cycle of crafting and survival has certainly trickled out into a few other indie games. But its larger, untold legacy probably lies in the future actions of a generation of children and teens, who lost themselves to Minecraft's Lego-like crafting and saw, through this game, how far their imaginations might one day be able to carry them.
