Y'know, okay, everyone talks about how alpha Minecraft had this extremely creepy vibe to a ton of players at the time and everyone acts like it's a mystery as to why and does a ton of super-deep analysis of how the alpha versions looked and what content the game had at that point, and this toy thinks that's stupid. Like, sure, the fog and whatever contributes, but "the game is foggy and there are cave noises" is not, in itself, why so many people found the game creepy. A lot of it comes down to three things:
Old Minecraft versions had abysmal dogshit sound design. Notch had no concept of "some sounds should be quieter than other sounds," so you got situations where sounds like footsteps or lava popping were just as loud as sounds like breaking blocks or a creeper exploding. Also, the old cow sounds, in particular, are just kind of disturbing.
Alpha Minecraft was not the most popular game of all time, published by Microsoft, and distributed via major console storefronts yet at that point. It was a random game made by some guy on 4chan that you downloaded as an exe from that guy's personal website, and that guy often didn't bother writing patch notes for what the updates were adding. Back then, nobody playing Minecraft had a very deep understanding of the game's content except for Notch himself. The game was very mysterious to players, and that sense of mystery was deepened and made creepy by things like cave sounds and music discs 11 and 13.
Minecraft was going through its alpha updates right around the time that indie horror games and creepypastas were just about to pop the fuck off. Minecraft transitioned from alpha to beta at the very end of 2010, and the creepypasta/indie horror boom really kicked into gear starting in 2011. The alpha versions were coming out at a time where the internet, as a whole, was starting to really want to be scared.
Somehow, though, despite the dozens and dozens of video essays recorded about this subject, this toy has never heard anyone mention any of these facts except for, like, one person very briefly touching on the second one.
Like, yeah, obviously the indie game made by Some Guy On 4chan distributed through a random website that's adding god-knows-what in every update and has dense fog and extremely jarring/offputting sound design at a time where the internet was gearing up for a massive horror boom is going to feel creepy. Obviously rumors were going to circulate about creepy shit in the game that wasn't actually there. There's no secret to it, you just need to look at the greater context of where Minecraft was culturally at in 2010.
