"Take this," I'm told as given a glowing cube-like orb. "You can use it to chop down trees." I look up at the pixelated tree in front of me. I swing the cup and start chopping it down to size. Anyone who's played Minecraft, the game, knows the experience. But now, I'm doing it in real life, the orb vibrating with haptic feedback.
"This might just look like an orb," Craig Leigh, the principal design director, tells me. "But there is a lot of brand new tech just made for this experience."
I'm on a quest to save a village, but I'm not playing Minecraft. I am in Minecraft. Everything is to scale — human scale. I see pigs, bees, skeletons and, of course, Creepers, projected on massive four-walled, interactive screens. Even the floor is interactive.
This is the closest you can get to experiencing Minecraft firsthand. Some game elements, Leigh explains, aren't possible to recreate smoothly in real life, such as the health bar when going underwater. But all the other interactions and elements are faithful to the game, down to the correct placement of the beehives. "You're walking directly into this world," says Leigh. "It's like I kidnapped you, took you through a portal, and you woke up in Minecraft."
Microsoft and Mojang Studios have never created anything quite like the Minecraft Experience — a project that was two years in development, with Microsoft and Mojang Studios working closely with Experience MOD and its partner company, Supply + Demand to bring this to life. Plano is the first place in the world to get Minecraft Experience: Villager Rescue.
"We picked the Dallas and Plano area because of the large number of Minecraft players here," Kayleen Walters, vice president of Minecraft franchise development, tells me. "Because of all the interactive activities here, the community of Dallas and Plano is used to looking for experiences like this."
Typically, groups of 25 people will take about an hour to go through the 20,000-plus-square-foot Minecraft Experience. Walters is giving us — myself, my wife and my son — a personal tour.
"We want people to experience the experience they would in the game," says Walters. "We want that consistency."
Blocky, digital snow falls on the screen. I look down on the floor, and kick it with my feet. The snowflakes scatter. This is impressive tech, I think. But it's not all digital. There are physical recreations of characters, and tactile interactions, like throwing fuzzy snowballs. We go from room to room, experience to experience, with our orbs glowing green.
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The experience is magical, and it's easy to forget how stunningly beautiful Minecraft can look. But this is an experience that's just for hardcore fans. Just as Minecraft is for anyone, so is Villager Rescue.
"Don't land in the lava," Walters says. My wife and I are stranded on two stones. Around us, digital lava. Stone blocks appear and disappear, and we wait for the right timing to hop across to safety, where our son waits.
Part of Minecraft's appeal is freedom. Sure, there are in-game parameters, but at its core, Minecraft is a personal experience — an ethos that is headed to movie theaters in April 2025 with the release of A Minecraft Movie. The movie was in production for ten years, going through different iterations of the story. According to Walters, "It was an adventure coming up with the adventure."
"It's not called The Minecraft Movie," Walters, an executive producer on the film, says, "because we don't want to create official lore and invalidate all the stories the community has created over the past 15 years. That's why we are calling it A Minecraft Movie." In the upcoming film, Walter explains, Jack Black plays the character Steve, but that is just in this Minecraft story. Someone could play the character in another Minecraft story.
"Our goal is to create more touch points for people to interact with Minecraft," says Walters.
In the past those have been through the game, merchandise or events, but now those touch points now include film and this new experience.
"The goal with opening Minecraft Experience in Plano was to let people experience Minecraft in their hometown," says Walters. "This is our first foray and we want to take Minecraft Experience across the U.S. and around the world. So see it while it's here."
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