I am quite a fan of the computer game, Minecraft. It is not exactly the first in the sandbox genre but has certainly defined it. It is a first person survival game, but what makes it "sandbox" is that there is no specific goals in the game and you can build your own structures in the world. I am always a little surprised when parents complain about the amount of time their kids spend playing this game. It is actually pretty creative and there are all kinds of design aspects to it. It makes me wish I had followed my first career thought as a kid, which was architecture.
There is a whole community that writes additional material (mods) for the game. The mods introduce a whole range of new things to the game: new tools, new materials for different looking structures, additional magic systems, and high tech machinery. There are also a few that have have introduced a questing system and a "story". In some ways this makes these mods more like traditional games, but the quest progression is still pretty loose. The two I have spent some time on are based on the 1.6.4 version of Minecraft: Agrarian Skies and Material Energy^3. They seem quite different: in Agrarian Skies you start on a small platform in a void world and have to develop materials from trees using the Ex Nihilo mod in addition to more standard ones. In Material Energy^3, you start on a pre-built base that you have to explore. This one has the MineChem mod which is new to me. Despite the different starts, the gameplay is somewhat similar. I would recommend both of them. They are available at the Feed the Beast modpack servers.
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