From mobile devices to PCs to consoles, the best-selling game of all time, Minecraft, is pretty much available to play anywhere you look. Mojang and Microsoft, however, have crossed yet another platform off their lists this week in celebration of the 15th anniversary of the game. For a limited time, you can play Minecraft right now through your Google search engine, albeit in a naturally condensed version that’s really more of an Easter egg than an actual Minecraft experience.
Google announced the neat Minecraft celebration this week with a teaser from its social accounts that urged people to simply head to Google’s search engine and search for “Minecraft.” Once you do, you’ll find the normal search results that you’d typically see when searing up Minecraft news including the latest updates, images, the site itself, and videos cataloguing Minecraft players’ creative builds, but you’ll also see a new button down at the bottom of your screen that looks like a block of dirt. It goes away when you scroll down, but returning to the top of the page brings it back.
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If you click on that dirt block, you’ll see Steve’s hand pop up on the screen. From there, experiment with tapping different parts of the Google search results including the modules for images, videos, and links pertaining to the game.
Once you start tapping or clicking around, you’ll find that these parts of the Google search results for Minecraft start falling away to reveal different scenes from Minecraft like a house with bookcases, grassy plains, wooded areas, and more. If you see dirt and stone blocks and other fixtures and resources that can usually be broken in Minecraft, you can click on those as well to break them.
As you punch out these blocks, you’ll find a scene starting to form where you work your way underground finding different resources until you eventually hit bedrock, though you can continue mining through random blocks after that. In the bottom-left corner of the screen, you’ll see a counter keeping track of how many blocks you break with different pickaxe upgrades awarded as you mine. I stopped at a nice even 500 when pecking away at the blocks and ended up with an enchanted pickaxe prior to that. Hitting the “X” button down at the bottom brings up a Creeper that explodes to clear the screen once you’re done.
Again, it’s not exactly the full Minecraft experience, but it’s a neat way to pass the time if you’re waiting on someone to actually come and play Minecraft with you. After trying it on different platforms, it seems that this Easter egg works regardless of what browser your using including Firefox, Microsoft Edge, Safari, and presumably others so long as you’re searching through Google.
