While Minecraft was only officially released a few months back, it's been available and playable for years. The thing is, most people who ever played the game played it later, after a ton of additions and improvements had been made.
Few ever got to see the game like this. This is what Minecraft looked like on May 19, 2009, the first day a build was made available for download over on the TIGSource forums.
PC Gamer have gone digging back through that original thread and found that the game's appeal was evident from the get-go, people posting mere minutes later things like "Oh hell, that's pretty cool. I just dig around in the ground a bit, and suddenly I'm in this underground cave! Great sense of exploration already."
The tone of what most people would do with Minecraft was also there to see barely an hour after it was made available.
"Here's a video of a castle I made"
The thread is still up for reading, it's interesting stuff!
Minecraft (alpha) [TIGSource, via PC Gamer]