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 Around November 2011, the mod "Forge" was released. Rather than adding new gameplay features to "Minecraft", "Forge" allowed players to be able to run several client-side mods simultaneously. Before becoming compatible with "Forge", "IndustrialCraft" and "BuildCraft" would not run side-by-side, because both of them needed to overwrite the same "Minecraft" base Java files. "Forge" ended the necessity to manipulate these files, allowing separate mods to run together without requiring them to touch the base source code. After "Minecraft" received its first full release in November 2011, the game's modding community continued to grow. In February 2012, Mojang hired developers of