You are aware that I said ‘at least one’, right? Although Minecraft has all three. It has a scoring system literally named ‘score’, Hardcore mode ends if you die, and killing the Ender Dragon rolls the credits.
Alpha/beta is an arbitrary line in the sand drawn by the developers. Notch could have woken up one day and decided that the state the game was in was final and call the game done.
If you weren’t told it was an alpha game you’d have no way of knowing. It sold a million copies while in alpha/beta, more than most other games ever made. The distinction between “alpha/beta test of game” and “game” is a distinction without a difference, especially for all the people buying it.
All three of those things were added in Sept-Nov of 2021. By January 2021 the game had already sold >1 million copies.
It was absolutely a game at that point, ask anyone who played it. Being blatantly unfinished doesn’t matter, it would have remained a game even if he never ended any of those features.
This is a straight-up lie. Hardcore and the Ender Dragon were added in 2012, in the patch that would become 1.0.0. Score was added in 0.24_SURVIVAL_TEST in 2009 (https://minecraft.wiki/w/Java_Edition_Classic_0.24_SURVIVAL_...). Do you have any examples that aren’t outright fabrications?