What was Minecraft: Story Mode? Everything you need to know

With Minecraft's high-flying popularity in the late 2010s, Mojang partnered with Telltale Games to create Minecraft: Story Mode.

Releasing episodes from 2015 to 2017, Minecraft: Story Mode was an episodic adventure game that used a point-and-click interface similar to Telltale's adaptations of The Walking Dead and Game of Thrones.

Players followed the story of a player-created character named Jesse, who tries to save the world from various threats along with their friends. The game's two seasons garnered moderate success, but has since been made unavailable on numerous digital outlets due to the closure of Telltale Games in 2018.

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Minecraft: Story Mode - Additional info and why the game was removed from marketplaces

In addition to the game series, Minecraft: Story Mode also saw a run on Netflix's streaming platform (Image via Telltale Games)

Minecraft: Story Mode was a significant departure from the original game's roots, focusing on a choice-based narrative and the world's characters as opposed to Minecraft's usual harvesting and building mechanics.

Over the course of the first season, players followed Jesse and friends set out to find The Order of the Stone, who once saved the Overworld from the scourge of a danger known as the Wither Storm.

Season two finds a reformed order under Jesse and their friends embarking on a new adventure centered around a strange prismarine gauntlet and a shadowy antagonist known to most as "The Admin".

The final episode of Season 2 was released in 2017, and Netflix even picked up Minecraft: Story Mode on its streaming service. However, in 2018, Telltale's financial troubles began to accumulate.

By November, Telltale would shutter its doors and begin the process of delisting its games from digital marketing places such as the PlayStation Store and Xbox LIVE Marketplace.

Many of these games were delisted due to the nature of their licensing agreements, as Telltale had used many popular intellectual properties in their games such as Game of Thrones, Batman, The Walking Dead, and Borderlands. When Telltale went under, they stated that they had to pull these games, including Minecraft: Story Mode, due to expiring licensing rights.

On May 31, 2019, Mojang released a news update detailing the timeline for players to download the game before it was removed from digital marketplaces:

"On behalf of the publisher, Minecraft: Story Mode - A Telltale Games Series, Season 1 and 2 will no longer be supported on June 25th, 2019. If you have purchased these seasons, please download all remaining episodes prior to the service being discontinued in June."

Since its removal, Minecraft: Story Mode has largely only been accessible to players who already have the game or those who use third-party sites or software to download it.

There has been little word on the adventures of Jesse and their friends continuing. However, with the game's property rights still under Microsoft and Mojang, Minecraft players who enjoyed the adventure title should never say never.

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