A Minecraft player recently showed off a picture of the game being run on a CRT TV. The picture provides a glimpse of what Minecraft looks like on the old device.
The CRT - short for Cathode Ray Tube - TV was one of the earliest televisions to be invented, with its origins dating back to the late 1800s. However, it has long since largely fallen out of use, with most people using newer types of TVs such as LCDs. Minecraft, meanwhile, began development in 2009, decades after the CRT TV was first made available to the public.
The picture was posted by LordChickenNugget23 on Reddit. In the picture, the CRT TV's screen shows the player in one of Minecraft's plains biomes. The game seems to be rendered almost completely in grayscale, and has the horizontal scan lines across the display which are inherent to CRT TVs. The TV is shown to have a keyboard attachment allowing Minecraft's PC version to be played on it. According to subsequent posts by LordChickenNugget23, they were able to run the game on the CRT TV using adapters.
The practice of playing both newer games and retro videogames on old CRT televisions has arisen within the gaming community over the past few years. Numerous gamers have attested that CRT TVs provides better image resolution for games than LCD TVs - particularly in the case of older games. Other gamers, meanwhile, claim that using a CRT TV adds to the sense of nostalgia when retro-gaming.
The fact that Minecraft is capable of being run on such an old and outdated device serves as a testament both to the game's accessibility and the CRT TV's ability to effectively run and render even a game as expansive as Minecraft. As previously mentioned, Minecraft is not the first 21st-century game to be run on a CRT TV, but this does appear to provide further support to gamers' claims about the CRT TV's usefulness.
While CRT TVs are no longer made, it is still possible to find and/or purchase them in various stores or online. This will allow gamers to play a newer game with the better image and motion resolution provided by CRT TVs, to participate in retro-gaming, or to experience the nostalgia provided by a CTR TV's display while enjoying more modern games. This, in turn, could lead to a further increase in the use of such TVs among the gaming community as a whole.
Minecraft is available now on PC, macOS, Xbox One, Playstation 4, Nintendo Switch, and mobile devices.