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 official modding application programming interface (API). Texture packs that alter the game's textures and HUD are also available, as created by the community. In July 2013, texture packs were replaced with "resource packs", which have the same role as texture packs, but allow custom audio as well. Players are also create their own maps, which often contain specific rules, challenges, puzzles and quests, and share them for others to play. In August 2012, Mojang added adventure mode for custom maps and in October 2012, Mojang added command blocks, which were created specially for custom maps. In February 2016, Mojang added