The creator of the highly popular Minecraft game has announced the development of its next project, a rather ambitious one: 0x10c. Apparently, the name is a riddle and we’ll soon be taught how to pronounce it correctly, but until then we should focus on the details of the game, since it’s really a very promising one.

0x10c will be a game set in space, in a parallel universe, where people made a small error that put the entire humanity to sleep for a loooong time: now it’s year 281 474 976 712 644 AD, and the universe looks like nothing we knew until now, being filled with black holes and basically on the brink of destruction.

Here’s how the entire story behind 0x10c goes according to Notch himself:

In 1988, a brand new deep sleep cell was released, compatible with all popular 16 bit computers. Unfortunately, it used big endian, whereas the DCPU-16 specifications called for little endian. This led to a severe bug in the included drivers, causing a requested sleep of 0x0000 0000 0000 0001 years to last for 0x0001 0000 0000 0000 years.

It’s now the year 281 474 976 712 644 AD, and the first lost people are starting to wake up to a universe on the brink of extinction, with all remote galaxies forever lost to red shift, star formation long since ended, and massive black holes dominating the galaxy.

Although the game is still in its early development stages, Notch plans to release a playable version as soon as possible and, just like it happens with Minecraft, to let the players shape the universe of 0x10c. Mainly a multiplayer game, 0x10c will probably require us to pay a small monthly fee, while the single player experience will have no recurring pay.

No screenshots have been released yet, but we’re certainly keeping an eye on this project and we’ll tell you more about 0x10c as soon as we have the details.