Minecraft continues to be a force within the gaming industry and beyond. After launching back in 2011, the franchise has gone on to expand with spinoff titles like Minecraft Dungeons, as well as jumping to other mediums like Netflix with the series, Minecraft: Story Mode. Now, it seems the hit franchise is evolving again.
Hasbro, the company behind many of the world's favourite toys, has announced that Minecraft will be getting its own line of Nerf guns, which will begin by introducing the Pillager's Crossbow and the Stormlander from Minecraft Dungeons. Those who want to clear their homes of pesky creepers, spiders and zombies can get their hands on the new Nerf weaponry as of November 22 from the Walmart website.
The weapons themselves have the unique, blocky Minecraft style at the heart of their design. The Pillager's Crossbow comes from the Pillager mob, introduced in Autumn of 2018, and is dropped as loot whenever the player defeats one of these villagers gone bad. The Stormlander from Minecraft Dungeons is a hammer seemingly modelled after the weapon of a certain Norse god of thunder. A rare drop in Minecraft's dungeon-crawling spinoff, the Stormlander can blast foes with lightning, which Nerf has made the hammer itself a blaster which shoots blue darts.
Nerf's crossover with Minecraft is not the toy company's first collaboration with a popular gaming product. In 2019, Nerf revealed the AR-L blaster which was directly inspired by and used to promote Fortnite. Since then, Nerf has brought out multiple Fortnite blasters, from pistols to rocket launchers. More recently, Nerf announced their partnership with the Halo franchise, producing a version of the Needler gun wielded by the Grunts and Jackals of the Covenant. It's safe to say then that Hasbro and Nerf have been partnering with popular video game IPs for a while, and the Minecraft blasters are likely to be the latest in a long line of videogame blasters.
Though it is now over a decade old, Minecraft is a game that has clearly stood the test of time. Major updates are still being released for the game, for example the Caves & Cliffs Part 2 Update which will soon be released. More importantly than the game being updated though, is the fact that there has been a consistently huge amount of people logging onto the ultimate mining and crafting experience. Minecraft fans are a massively diverse group, coming from all ages and backgrounds as the game continues to generate new players and keep old ones returning time and time again.
The collaboration between Nerf and Minecraft seems aptly timed then, with the aforementioned Caves & Cliffs Part 2 Update and the run up to Christmas right around the corner, now seems the perfect time to be dropping some extra goodies for Minecraft fans.
Source: Walmart