Minecraft wiki entry for 2010_Indie_of_the_Year_Awards, associated text: The original platform for Minecraft, running on Windows, macOS, and Linux and started through the launcher. The game was initially released for an "early private singleplayer alpha" on May 17, 2009, followed by several development stages (notably Classic, Indev, Infdev, Alpha, Beta) with the game finally being released on November 18, 2011. The Java Edition has seen many significant updates since its official release.