Minecraft Earth Announced For Smartphones, Features AR Gameplay Similar To Pokemon GO

It looks like the Minecraft franchise will be celebrating its 10th birthday by finally breaking out into the real world!

Today, the Minecraft team revealed Minecraft Earth – an all-new augmented reality game for smartphones. It will be similar to Pokemon GO in that players can visit ‘Tapables’ in real-world locations to collect building resources. With these resources, players will then be able to build structures and interact with creatures in the game.

Check out the official reveal trailer below, along with some interview snippets with the game’s developers.

“Minecraft Earth proposes to completely break the dogma that has lived with us in computing since the beginning: this idea of a single person that holds a single device to create a single experience. With Minecraft Earth, that’s no longer the case. The content is in the real world.” – Alex Kipman

“This is an adaptation, this is not a direct translation of Minecraft. If you like building Redstone machines, or you’re used to how the water flows, or how sand falls down, it all works. We have tried to stay very true to the kind of core design pillars of Minecraft, and we’ve worked with the design team in Stockholm to make sure that the spirit of the game is carried through. We have covered the entire planet in Minecraft. Every lake is a place you can fish, every park is a place you can chop down trees. We’ve actually taken maps of the entire world and converted them to Minecraft.” – Torfi Olafsson

For now, interested players can sign up over here to be one of the first few to play the game. We’ll report back if we hear any other interesting snippets about the game in the future.