Classic is the second development phase of Minecraft, following "Pre-classic" and being succeeded by Indev. It was the first Minecraft development stage to have some of its versions released to the public. This phase was unnamed until June 28, 2010, when a blog post was written to name the development phases of the game.

The release of the Survival game mode was conducted in a series of incremental tests named Survival Test. The test had a point-based system where the player could acquire points from killing some of the game's first mobs. Survival Test was quietly removed after the website received a major overhaul on December 16, 2010.