"There are these moments in digital entertainment and technology, where you have not just one, but a number of enabling technologies coming online at the same time," Torfi Olafsson, Minecraft Earth's game director, said in an interview with media. "It's this confluence that happens where, when you put them together, products appear that could never have appeared before."

Specifically, he's referring to the supercomputers we're all carrying around in our hands, which have powerful cameras and horsepower for advanced visual computing. But there are also plenty of other advancements that made Minecraft Earth possible: Olafsson points to Microsoft's massive Azure datacenter presence around the world, huge investments in augmented reality, better GPS capabilities and faster mobile networks (especially upcoming 5G speeds). It also helps, of course, that Minecraft is one of the most widely recognized games around. (In 2017, it was searched more often on YouTube than cats and all music combined, according to Minecraft executive producer Jesse Merriam.)

"When we say augmented reality, we actually mean augmented reality," Olafsson said. "It's not just a geocaching game with 2% of it in AR [ahem]. We decided to go head first and build the game from the ground up as an experience that you play both in your immediate environment, and out in the world, in parks and cities, wherever you are."

I saw the future of gaming in a nondescript meeting room in Seattle. I held up an iPhone, and ahead of me there was a Minecraft building sitting atop a table in AR. Just like every version of the game for the past decade, I could use the phone to take blocks away, stack new ones to shape it to my liking or drop in mobs (virtual animals). But since it's AR, I could interact with it like a real object: I got in close to check out all the tiny details and walked around the table for alternate angles. I wasn't alone, either. Several other journalists, who I could also see virtual avatars of in my phone, were tweaking the building at the same time. It was like we were kids playing together in a sandbox. In many ways, it was Minecraft in its purest form: pure creation through collaboration.

Even during our short demo, we managed to surprise the Minecraft developers by creating a mud slide that ended up covering a large portion of the environment. We dug as deep as we could, far lower than the surface of the table, to find the bedrock. We dropped a few chickens and cows into the world, and cackled as they fell into the pit. We could even push the animals slightly around the environment by nudging them with our phones.