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 virtual reality devices. On 31 July 2017, Mojang released the beta version of the update allowing cross-platform play. Realms also supports the Xbox One, Windows 10, Android, iOS, and Kindle platforms. Markus "Notch" Persson began developing the game as a project. He was inspired to create "Minecraft" by several other games such as "Dwarf Fortress", "Dungeon Keeper", and later "Infiniminer". At the time, he had visualized an isometric 3D building game that would be a cross between his inspirations and had made some early prototypes. "Infiniminer" heavily influenced the style of gameplay, including the first-person aspect of the game, the