If you go look at the HUD for even older games like Doom and Quake, you can see where that idea might have come from. Usually those “inventory slots” were for fixed items, namely ammo for the various guns, but having different things on different number keys was definitely in use back then. The new part, of course, was making a game mechanic out of changing the things under the number keys.
Have later games stolen it directly from Minecraft? Sure, but it’s such an obvious concept that someone else would have eventually invented it. In fact I’m not sure if Notch didn’t borrow it from something else that had that extra mechanic first.
And now it’s become a de facto standard like the positions of the clutch, brake and accelerator in a car. (And if you drive an automatic, the brake is still always to the left.)
A lot of survival games have ripped off the a-bunch-of-random-items-in-boxes-at-the-bottom-of-the-HUD UI elements from Minecraft.
Raft and Rust, for example.
Hotbars have been around long before Minecraft
Let’s see, I acknowledged that fact when someone else said it 21 hours ago. Now we’re up to three people informing me. Keep up.
You mean a hotbar? Minecraft didn’t come up with that.
But that could still be where most games copied it from.
Every MMO since the beginning of time (and frankly minecraft is weird for being a 10 button hotbar rather than a 12)
Diablo was doing that long before Minecraft came along.
My goodness why didn’t I think of that.
Because Sierra games were doing it in the 1980s?
If you go look at the HUD for even older games like Doom and Quake, you can see where that idea might have come from. Usually those “inventory slots” were for fixed items, namely ammo for the various guns, but having different things on different number keys was definitely in use back then. The new part, of course, was making a game mechanic out of changing the things under the number keys.
Have later games stolen it directly from Minecraft? Sure, but it’s such an obvious concept that someone else would have eventually invented it. In fact I’m not sure if Notch didn’t borrow it from something else that had that extra mechanic first.
And now it’s become a de facto standard like the positions of the clutch, brake and accelerator in a car. (And if you drive an automatic, the brake is still always to the left.)