Minecraft accolades. Social media, parodies, adaptations, merchandise, and the MineCon convention played large roles in popularizing the game. It has also been used in educational environments ("Minecraft Education Edition"), especially in the realm of computing systems, as virtual computers and hardware devices have been built in it. By late 2018, over 154 million copies had been sold across all platforms, making it the second best-selling video game of all time, behind "Tetris". In September 2014, Microsoft announced a deal to buy Mojang and the "Minecraft" intellectual property for , with the acquisition completed two months later. Spin-off games, such as "",
Minecraft mods (the Bedrock Edition), in the form of add-ons. Mods have influenced the main "Minecraft" game on three occasions. Mod developer Dr. Zhark added horses to the game through the "Mo' Creatures" mod. Later on he helped Mojang adapt horses for use in standard issue "Minecraft". Pistons were also originally a part of a mod too, but impressed "Minecraft"s creators so much that they added the feature to the main game. Mojang also admitted that they admired all of the work done on server side modding API Bukkit. In 2012, the Swedish company ended up hiring the lead developers of the