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 team to brainstorm the idea for a "Minecraft"-related game, given that the game was essentially a "blank canvas" for storytelling, according to Job Stauffer, and would create an interesting challenge. The two groups recognized the amount of fan-generated narrative content that existed in the way of YouTube videos and other media forms that demonstrated the potential for storytelling in the game. Many on Telltale's staff were also already fans of "Minecraft", with a private server that they played on, with some of the incidents that occurred on there becoming ideas for the game's story. Telltale began negotiations with Mojang in