Game Theory - The Secret Desert Origin of Minecraft Creepers

Episode Date: May 21, 2023

Join Game Theory host MatPat as he breaks down the origins of the ICONIC Minecraft Creeper! Credits: Writers: Matthew Patrick and Justin Kuiper Editors: Tyler Mascola, Pedro Freitas, Dan "Cybert" Seibert and Shannon (Bomb0i) Assistant Editor: AlyssaBeCrazy Sound Editor: Yosi Berman

Here we see the eye of Horus. The ancient Egyptians used it as a symbol of protection and good health. Ooh. And here we have ourselves the onk representing life. Write that down. Oh, yes, yes, yes. And this one, well, we just haven't figured this one out yet. Uh, Dr. Matt Pat, what's that hissing sound?

Probably just the sound my torch makes when it's... Oh, internet. Welcome to Game Theory, the show that continues to chisel away at the hidden lore of Minecraft. And in that little archaeological dig, we've covered the secrets hidden a lot of Minecraft's environments, but one that I've largely left ignored up till now has been the desert biome, which, I can now say having researched this theory, was a huge mistake on my part. While the desert might be lacking in life, it is teeming with lore, filled with subtle game design decisions that give us details about the long-forgotten ancient world of this game. In short, the desert is where

everything in the lost history of Minecraft's world began. So I hope you're thirsty, theorists. Thirsty for a nice, tall, cool glass of knowledge, that is, because today is all about cats, creepers, and desert temples, oh my! Now, to begin with a quick refresher, my little Minecraft lore series, which I've been building on for the better part of two years, began with the premise that the world of Minecraft was once home to an ancient civilization of builders who left behind the structures that we see today. Over time, we've been able to show that this ancient race was obsessed with preserving life, leading to experiments with Soul Sand that resulted in the creation of the wither, alongside other mobs that might also be made from Soul. Today we're going to examine a piece

of evidence in the game that is by far the strongest argument for this being the true history of the Minecraft universe, one absolutely intended by the game developers, and not just me, you know, doing that thing that I always do where I insert lore where lore was never meant to go. So what exactly am I talking about? Well, if we examine the blocks of the temples that spawns, randomly into the desert biome, we see a symbol that looks like a real-world hieroglyph, which in ancient Egypt was the symbol of life, the onk. And this should immediately strike you as odd. The world of Minecraft is entirely fictional, and largely a blank slate, where we can

layer in whatever adventures we want to have in this world. And yet, for some reason, this is our one instance of a real-world symbol being used in the Minecraft universe. I mean, when the game's developers were designing these structures, they didn't have to use any symbol. It's not like jungle temples or underwater temples have any sort of real-world symbology in them. So that's already an odd little outlier about these temples. But beyond that, if they really felt the need to use hieroglyphics, there are dozens of iconic ones that they could have chosen, like the Eye of Horace, which, if you ask me, is much more iconic. Get it? Iconic. I

hate myself so much. But instead, they decided to go with the Ankh, a symbol of life. Interesting. What's more, the Ank didn't just symbolize life. It was a symbol of the idea of the continuity of life. The ancient Egyptians were famous for mummifying their dead and then building elaborate, beautiful, and massive tombs for them. All of this was based on the idea that what we now think of as death wasn't the end of life, but rather just one step on their journey into the afterlife, hence the need to preserve the physical body even after all signs of life leave it. That is roughly what the onks stood for. Eternal life, life after death. Which, If you ask me, ties him pretty neatly with the theory that I've been crafting about these Minecraft builders.

An ancient civilization obsessed with life and finding a way to conquer death? Check. Building a bunch of ancient structures that have endured to the present day. Leaving archaeologists like us trying to piece together how these ancient civilizations operated? Check again. And this is just scratching the surface. The more that we dig into the desert biome, the more we start to get a clearer picture of what kinds of projects those ancient builders were working on.

Oh yeah, we're talking about those guys. One of gaming's most iconic enemies, the creeper. One of the first things that every player learns about the desert pyramids is, well, you've got to be careful. Because the people who built them left behind some traps. Traps in the form of T&T. In fact, desert pyramids are one of the very few places in the game that you can actually find TNT. You can find TNT near the ocean by looting buried treasure and shipwrecks, but the only places that you're going to be finding TNT in the world itself are in the desert pyramids or in certain woodland mansion rooms.

Put a pin in that woodland mansion stuff, we're going to come back to that in a few minutes. Now, the Desert Temple TNT is notable because TNT has a very specific connection to the creeper. Obviously, TNT and the creeper are both very explodey. They both make a similar hissing sound. You may also notice that crafting TNT requires gunpowder. And one of the few reliable sources of gunpowder is killing creepers. What you might not know about the creeper is that they are literally made of TNT. No joke.

In the official Minecraft book, The Mob Beastiary, you get to see a cross-section of a creeper. that has a TNT block shoved right into the center of its body. Now, in case you didn't realize this, Mother Nature doesn't tend to put neat little labels on your internal organs. Otherwise, all those dissections in high school science class would be way easier. No, this outright tells us that the creeper was an artificial creation by some sort of people that would label a block of explosives as TNT, like, for example, the same civilization that built the desert pyramids and rigged them with TNT traps.

And yeah, I get that the TNT label is kind of a joke, but also it's kind of not a joke because in that same Mabistiary entry, which is written from the perspective of an in-world adventurer, they point out that, quote, the ancient desert temples clearly portray the creeper's image. Now, it might seem weird at first to suggest that the creepers were made by a civilization located in a desert, or even made in a desert at all. After all, creepers are green and the desert biome is significantly less green than other places in the game world.

But remember, this mob was made by an ancient, civilization, and the desert they lived in might not be completely identical to the desert that we see today. In fact, just like with the Ankh, this is another place where I think turning to real-world Egypt can actually give us some insight. But most people's mental picture of Egypt just includes things like the pyramids and sand, lots and lots of sand, Egypt is also home to the Nile River, which is surrounded by lush plant life. So yeah, turns out that real-world Egypt is home to the sort of stuff that creepers could potentially be made out of. But of course, we don't care about real-world deserts we care about Minecraft deserts. Could a lush green bomb monster come out of there?

We unfortunately don't see the same kind of lush floral wildlife in the game that we see in real world Egypt after all. But could Minecraft's deserts have once flowed with a river similar to the Nile? Is there even a way that we could possibly tell this fact in a video game? Yes and yes. In fact, we can know it in the game in much the same way that real world researchers have to solve the same problem in real life, using geologic formation. Answering the question of what ancient world looked like is something that real world researchers have to tackle all the time. Since Mars has been in the news lately, let's use that as our example. Many scientists currently believe that Mars was once home to liquid water.

But why would they think that, considering the planet is currently drier than donkey's sense of humor? Well, because of geologic formations. The surface of Mars has canyons, the same kind of canyons that would be carved by a flowing river, and have been carved by a flowing river here on Earth. By the same token, we can look at the desert, hills, and Minecraft, and can include the high likelihood that they also would have been made by ancient waterways, slowly carving away at the land bit by bit, year after year.

How do I know that I'm not completely overthinking this? Remember, these aren't just sand dunes. If you start digging down, you hit sandstone, a rock that is formed mostly in rivers, lakes, the ocean floor, and beaches, all places that either currently have or once had water. So yeah, given what we know about real world Egypt, the geologic formations of the biome, the fact that creepers are depicted in the temples, the connections to T&T, and heck, just the fact that creepers spawn in deserts, we get a good sense that creepers, the ancient builders, and the desert biomes may just all be connected. But if you look at the loot that appears in desert pyramids, another interesting picture starts to emerge.

For one thing, you can loot ancient chests and find bones and rotten flesh. Not all that different from real-world archaeologists uncovering ancient Egyptian pyramids and finding preserved human remains. Oh god. When we loot boxes in Minecraft and get rotten flesh, it's actually the flesh of ancient humans? We're desecrating 8-bit corpses? Oh, that puts it an entirely new perspective. But what's really interesting about this outside of the fact that now we've realized that we're just all poking dead bodies is the next most common item that we'll find in these chests, string.

Now, string might seem like the odd one out here. Maybe it's just a coincidence that it appears with the exact same frequency as sand and gunpowder, but I think there's something else going on here. Consider this. In the Minecraft world, string is connected to cats. After all, tamed cats have a chance of giving string to the player, and cats drop string when they die. The premise is that cats love playing with string. But why would the ancient builder civilization that made the desert pyramids have any sort of connection with cats?

Well, once again, we can turn to real-world Egypt. The ancient Egyptians considered cats to be sacred. A number of Egyptian deities had cat-heads. Ancient religious texts from the time detailed the protective function of cats, as they were considered responsible for killing venomous snakes, and were considered in the first dynasty of Egypt to play an important role in keeping the pharaoh safe. Even on his journey into the afterlife, skeletal remains show that many pharaohs were buried with cats to keep them safe.

The fact that Egyptians held cats as sacred was something that enemies would sometimes take advantage of in battle. In the 6th century BC during the Battle of Pelusium, Persian soldiers used cats as shields, expecting that Egyptians would be hesitant to attack if they thought they would risk hurting cats. Even wilder than the fact that they tried this as a combat maneuver is the fact that it actually worked. So how does this relate to the Minecraft world? Well, wouldn't you know it, but there's a particular Minecraft mob that's repelled by the appearance of cats, the creeper. It's a weird detail, right? Why this creature, of all mobs, would avoid something as random as cats?

Well, it suggests, either one, that it's scared of cats, or two, that it is the creation of a civilization that somehow found cats important. Creepers avoid cats because they don't want to hurt them, just like the ancient Egyptians avoided cats in wartime for fear of hurting the sacred creatures. I mean, seriously, it seems highly possible that the ancient builders made creepers with their own cat-worshipping sensibilities in mind. But those ancient desert builders aren't the only ones in the Minecraft world to worship cats. If you've ever found a woodland mansion, you might have stumbled across a room with a giant cat statue. It is unexpected, to say the least. Why would they do that? Well, you might say that the cat statue is a true.

tribute to the Minecraft lead designer's Petcat Newton, and you'd be right, but there are lots of places that you could put this Easter egg. Why place it here in the Woodland Mansion specifically? Well, remember earlier this episode when I mentioned that TNT only appears in two places in the Minecraft world? One was the Desert Pyramid, obviously, but the other is the Woodland Mansion, where you also find chests that are booby-trapped with TNT. Huh, something tells me that the Illigeres might be copying someone's homework. And not just with cats and TNT either, but with the whole concept of life itself, most notably through their usage of the totems of the undying.

But these Egyptian connections just take it all one step further. Cats, TNT, A Quest for Eternal Life, from ancient Egypt to Minecraft desert temples to woodland mansions, it all connects. And now we start to see how these pieces may start to fall together. Could it be that creepers were some of the earliest creations of the ancient builders, living in their desert temples? Perhaps it was their experiments with life and creating life that led to the creation of a walking, sentient pillar of TNT.

And, as a society that valued cats, just like their counterparts in real world Egypt, and as evidenced by the strings stored throughout their loot boxes, they endowed their creations with a similar respect for felines. And from there, could it be that illagers are long-lost descendants of that culture, with their cat statues and their T&T booby traps? Or are they just imitating this ancient culture, cargo culting it without really knowing the logic or reason behind it? Who knows?

Anyway, that, my friends, is the uncanny connection between creepers, cats, and desert temples. The strange coincidences just keep building, don't they? And you can bet I'll be here to cover it all. But until the next one, remember, it's all just a theory. A game theory. Thanks for watching.