10 More Shameless Video Game Rip-Offs (That Were Actually Great)

Minecraft has sold over 300 million copies, making it the most successful video game by a significant margin. So, it's safe to say Mojang's blocky title has done pretty well for itself.

This is all the more impressive, considering Minecraft's premise was mined from another source. In Zach Barth's Infiniminer, players had to travel around a procedurally generated maps to mine for materials.

Despite coming up with the concept, Barth didn't see the project's potential. Though Infiniminer focuses on teams racing against each other to find precious material, players were more interested in building elaborate structures with their findings.

After Swedish programmer, Markus Persson, played Infiniminer, he believed the game would benefit if the building mechanics had more variation. Two years later, he crafted his own version of Infiniminer, which became Minecraft.

Now, there's no question the pixellated sandbox game is derivative. (It was literally built from the same art and code as Barth's work.) However, Persson's cube-oriented title was leagues ahead of the game it spawned from, even in its original state.

With Minecraft boasting more features than ever nowadays, it's clear why it's still going strong after a decade.