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: Story Mode early 2013, and began work on the title shortly thereafter. Stauffer noted that Microsoft's acquisition of Mojang was not a factor in the game's development, as their interaction with Mojang began well before Microsoft's negotiations. Telltale opted to create a new main character of Jesse for "Minecraft: Story Mode" instead of using default "Steve" character from "Minecraft", feeling that they did not want to attempt to rewrite how players already saw this character in the game. Other primary characters in the game are loosely designed around archetypes of common player-characters for "Minecraft", such that those that engage in building, fighting,