- You’ve mined your first block of dirt, punched a tree for wood, and probably thrown up an ugly starter shack you’re still oddly proud of — that’s the on-ramp for a few hundred million players by now. Mojang Studios’ Minecraft debuted in 2011, after two years cycling through alpha and beta, as a survival sandbox built entirely from destructible, placeable blocks — the game that turned “building game” into its own genre instead of a Lego licensing gimmick. It’s since sold more than 300 million copies, making it the best-selling video game of all time. This guide walks through Minecraft games in order, covering release dates, platforms, and standout features from the block-breaking 2011 original all the way to 2026’s upcoming Minecraft Dungeons II.
Overview of the Minecraft Franchise
Minecraft started as a side project for Swedish programmer Markus “Notch” Persson in May 2009, inspired by Dwarf Fortress, Infiniminer, and Dungeon Keeper. What began as a cave-generation tech demo became a full survival-crafting loop — punch trees, mine ore, craft tools, fight off zombies and skeletons at night, and eventually descend into the Nether or defeat the Ender Dragon in The End. The original PC build runs on Java (hence “Java Edition”); a separate C++-based Bedrock Edition later unified mobile, console, and Windows players into one cross-play ecosystem. What sets Minecraft apart from other survival-sandbox games isn’t the block-building itself — it’s redstone, the in-game logic system that lets players wire up working computers, and the total absence of a mandated goal. Also Read: Terraria Games in Order.
Complete List of Minecraft Games in Order
This list follows real-world release order, which — unlike the Borderlands or Wolfenstein timelines — is basically all you need here. Minecraft’s spin-offs aren’t chapters in one continuous story; Story Mode’s Jesse, Dungeons’ Arch-Illager, and Legends’ piglin invasion are self-contained tales that happen to share a universe. Play them whenever, in whatever order interests you — this rundown goes chronologically so you can track how the franchise expanded from one sandbox into several very different genres.
1. Minecraft (2011)
- Release Date: November 18, 2011 (full release; public alpha launched May 17, 2009)
- Platforms: Windows, macOS, Linux (Java Edition); later expanded via Bedrock Edition to Android, iOS, Xbox 360/One/Series X|S, PlayStation 3/4/5, Nintendo Switch, and more
- Engine: Java (LWJGL) for Java Edition; C++ for Bedrock Edition
- Key Features: procedurally generated voxel worlds, Survival/Creative/Hardcore modes, crafting and redstone logic, the Nether and The End dimensions, multiplayer servers
- Description: Minecraft drops you into an infinite, procedurally generated world made of one-meter cubes with no tutorial and no required objective. Survival mode has you gathering wood and stone before nightfall, when zombies and skeletons come out; Creative mode strips away hunger and combat so you can just build. The 2011 full release added the Nether dimension, enchanting, and the Ender Dragon fight in The End, turning what had been an open-ended building toy into something with actual stakes and an endgame — while still leaving most of what you do entirely up to you.
- Reception: Minecraft doesn’t carry one unified Metacritic score since it’s spread across dozens of platform releases, but individual console editions have scored as high as 93, and the game is routinely cited among the highest-rated titles ever made. Praise has been near-universal for its creative freedom and redstone engineering; the most common criticism, especially early on, was the total lack of guidance for new players.
2. Minecraft: Story Mode (2015)
- Release Date: October 13, 2015 (Episode 1; season extended with three Adventure Pass episodes through September 2016)
- Platforms: PC, Mac, PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, Xbox 360, Xbox One, iOS, Android, Wii U, later Nintendo Switch (August 2017)
- Engine: Telltale Tool
- Key Features: episodic point-and-click narrative, branching dialogue and choice consequences, five main episodes plus three Adventure Pass bonus episodes, an original playable protagonist in Jesse
- Description: Story Mode ditches the sandbox entirely for a Telltale-style narrative adventure. You play Jesse, an aspiring hero who — after a convention goes catastrophically wrong — sets out with friends to track down the legendary Order of the Stone before a rampaging Wither Storm destroys the world. It’s the first time Minecraft got an actual plot, cast, and voice acting (Patton Oswalt among them), trading building and mining for quick-time events and dialogue trees. Combat and puzzles exist, but they’re closer to interactive-movie set dressing than anything resembling the main game.
- Reception: Story Mode landed a Metascore of 71 — solidly “mixed to positive.” Critics praised the writing’s humor and the faithfulness of the Minecraft-style art direction, but were split on whether quick-time events and limited player agency undercut the appeal of putting players inside a world they already love building in.
- Expansions: Adventure Pass (Episodes 6–8, 2016), later bundled with the original five episodes as The Complete Adventure (2017).
3. Minecraft: Story Mode – Season Two (2017)
- Release Date: July 11, 2017 (later ported to Nintendo Switch, November 2018)
- Platforms: PC, Mac, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Xbox 360, iOS, Android, Nintendo Switch
- Engine: Telltale Tool
- Key Features: choice carryover from Season One, a central mystery built around a mysterious gauntlet, expanded cast including Radar and Lluna the llama, returning veterans Axel, Olivia, and Petra
- Description: Picking up after the Wither Storm crisis, Season Two finds Jesse and friends adjusting to hero status and fading friendships — until a gauntlet fuses itself to Jesse’s hand and drags the group into a new threat called the Admin. It’s a direct continuation rather than a soft reboot: choices from Season One theoretically ripple into this story, and returning characters get real screen time. The core format — five episodes, dialogue trees, occasional combat — stays intact, though the production leans harder into the sci-fi-tinged mystery of who the Admin actually is.
- Reception: Season Two never accumulated enough critic reviews for an official Metascore, but the coverage that did surface was mixed — several outlets called it a mechanical improvement over Season One that still struggled with a thinner, less essential story. It also turned out to be the franchise’s final season: Telltale’s 2018 closure ended any chance of a Season Three.
4. Minecraft Earth (2019)
- Release Date: Closed beta July 16, 2019; wider rollout October 17, 2019; worldwide December 11, 2019 (discontinued June 30, 2021)
- Platforms: iOS, iPadOS, Android
- Engine: Bedrock Engine, adapted for mobile AR
- Key Features: augmented-reality building via your phone camera, real-world location-based resource gathering, portable “buildplates,” Adventure mode encounters, mob collecting
- Description: Minecraft Earth took the Pokémon Go formula and ran it through a block-building filter: walk around your actual neighborhood, and the game drops resources, mobs, and mini “Adventures” onto a live AR map for you to collect and battle. Buildplates let you construct portable Minecraft structures you could then view life-size on a tabletop or floor through your phone’s camera. It was ambitious, genuinely inventive tech for its time, and completely dependent on players being outside and near other people — which turned out to be a fatal design flaw the moment a pandemic hit.
- Reception: Minecraft Earth won Best VR/AR Game honors from the Game Critics Awards and drew praise for its AR execution, but it never built a review-aggregate consensus the way Mojang’s other titles did — it was gone less than two years after its worldwide launch, discontinued in mid-2021 as Microsoft cited the impossibility of “free movement and collaborative play” during COVID-19 lockdowns.
5. Minecraft Dungeons (2020)
- Release Date: May 26, 2020 (Xbox Series X|S added November 10, 2020; Steam added September 22, 2021)
- Platforms: Windows, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Nintendo Switch
- Engine: Unreal Engine 4
- Key Features: classless dungeon-crawler loot system, up to four-player local/online co-op, procedurally varied level layouts, enchantable gear
- Description: Minecraft Dungeons swaps the open sandbox for a top-down, Diablo-style loot crawler — you and up to three friends fight through canyons, swamps, and mineshafts toward the Arch-Illager, picking up gear that actually matters instead of just cosmetic skins. There’s no class system; your build comes entirely from the weapons, armor, and artifacts you find, which keeps runs feeling different even when the mission structure repeats. It’s the first spin-off to actually change the verb of what you’re doing in a Minecraft game — less building and surviving, more fighting and looting.
- Reception: Dungeons settled at a Metascore of 70 — reviewers generally found it a solid, approachable entry point into the dungeon-crawler genre, especially for younger players or Minecraft fans who’d never touched an ARPG, but genre veterans criticized its shallow build variety and repetitive mission structure.
- Expansions: Jungle Awakens, Creeping Winter, Howling Peaks, Flames of the Nether, Hidden Depths, and Echoing Void DLC packs, later bundled into the Ultimate Edition.
6. Minecraft Legends (2023)
- Release Date: April 18, 2023
- Platforms: Windows, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Nintendo Switch
- Key Features: real-time action-strategy gameplay, mob recruitment and army command, base-building, PvP and co-op multiplayer modes
- Description: Legends is the biggest structural swing the franchise has taken: it’s an action-strategy game, closer to a stripped-down StarCraft than anything resembling classic Minecraft. You don’t fight directly — instead you rally villagers, golems, and other mobs into an army, build outposts, and lead assaults against piglins pouring out of the Nether to conquer the Overworld. It’s a genuinely different genre wearing Minecraft’s skin, which is exactly why it split opinion: it nails the aesthetic and social multiplayer hook, but asks longtime fans to give up building and mining almost entirely.
- Reception: Legends landed a Metascore of 71 across its release platforms — critics called it an accessible, colorful entry point into real-time strategy, but consistently flagged shallow unit variety and chaotic crowd control as its biggest weaknesses. Mojang stopped releasing new content for it in January 2024, less than a year after launch.
7. Minecraft Dungeons II (2026)
- Release Date: September 29, 2026 (announced)
- Platforms: Windows, Xbox Series X|S, PlayStation 5, Nintendo Switch, Nintendo Switch 2 — day one on Xbox Game Pass
- Key Features: expanded four-player co-op, a new dimension called the Sift, new enemy types, deeper gear and loadout customization
- Description: The follow-up to 2020’s Dungeons doesn’t reinvent the loop so much as widen it: new regions, the mysterious Sift dimension, fresh enemy types, and expanded gear customization, built by the same Mojang Studios and Double Eleven team behind the original. Early messaging leans hard on scale — “high-stakes encounters” and “never-before-seen locations” — while keeping the accessible four-player co-op crawl that made the first Dungeons a sleeper hit. It’s launching day one on Xbox Game Pass, which should hand it a much bigger built-in audience than the original ever had at launch.
- Reception: Not yet reviewed — Minecraft Dungeons II is scheduled to release September 29, 2026, priced at $29.99, with pre-orders already live across every announced platform.
Evolution of the Minecraft Series
The biggest shift in Minecraft’s own history didn’t come from a spin-off — it came in 2017, when Mojang unified the fractured Pocket Edition, console, and Windows builds into a single Bedrock Edition with cross-play, following Microsoft’s 2014 acquisition of the studio. Everything since has been about expansion outward rather than a numbered sequel: Story Mode (2015) tested whether Minecraft could support a written plot, Earth (2019) tested augmented reality, Dungeons (2020) tested a genre pivot into ARPGs, and Legends (2023) pushed that pivot even further into real-time strategy. Graphically, the core game barely changed for a decade until the “Vibrant Visuals” rendering overhaul arrived on newer hardware — proof Mojang would rather keep updating one game forever than replace it.
Which Minecraft Game Should You Play?
New to the franchise entirely? Start with base Minecraft — every spin-off assumes you already understand crafting, mobs, and the day-night cycle. Fans of couch co-op and loot chasing should go straight to Minecraft Dungeons; it’s the most immediately fun spin-off and the cheapest way to see what a Minecraft ARPG feels like. If you want a story with actual stakes and dialogue, the original Minecraft: Story Mode season holds up better than its sequel. Strategy fans curious about something different should try Minecraft Legends, with the caveat that its multiplayer servers eventually went quiet. And if you just want more of the good stuff Dungeons already proved out, Minecraft Dungeons II is the one to watch for this September.
Frequently Asked Questions
What order should I play Minecraft games in? Release order works fine, since none of the Minecraft games in order share a continuous story — start with the original 2011 sandbox, then branch out to Story Mode, Dungeons, Legends, or the upcoming Dungeons II in whatever order interests you.
How many Minecraft games are there? Counting the base game and its major spin-offs, there are seven: Minecraft, Minecraft: Story Mode, Minecraft: Story Mode – Season Two, Minecraft Earth, Minecraft Dungeons, Minecraft Legends, and the upcoming Minecraft Dungeons II.
Do I need to play the spin-offs? No. Every spin-off is optional and self-contained — you can play just the core Minecraft game for years and never touch Story Mode, Dungeons, or Legends without missing anything essential. They’re worth trying if their specific genre — narrative adventure, ARPG, strategy — appeals to you.
What’s the next Minecraft game? Minecraft Dungeons II, releasing September 29, 2026, on Windows, Xbox Series X|S, PlayStation 5, Nintendo Switch, and Nintendo Switch 2, with day-one availability on Xbox Game Pass.
Conclusion
That’s the full rundown of Minecraft games in order, from a blocky 2011 tech demo that became the best-selling video game ever made to a strategy spin-off and an ARPG sequel nobody saw coming a decade ago. Whichever entry you start with, the core appeal hasn’t changed much: a world built from cubes that rewards whatever you feel like doing with it. Got a favorite spin-off, or think Legends deserved better? Drop it in the comments below. And if sandbox and survival games are your thing, check out our Terraria and Stardew Valley order guides next.
Now go punch some trees.
