In brief: The question of whether something can run Doom is almost always yes, it can. But Minecraft, while not exactly renowned for being graphically intensive, is more demanding and modern, so it's especially impressive that a YouTuber managed to get the game running on Nintendo's 1998 Game Boy Color.
The feat was achieved by Game of Tobi (via Retro Dodo), who's a bit of an expert at getting games running on devices they were never designed for, though this is the first Game Boy project he has shown.
Game of Tobi chose Minecraft because the first big project on the channel was getting the best-selling game of all time running on the Game Boy Advance.
The modder admits that he wasn't sure Minecraft would work on a handheld that launched generations before portable hardware tech for 3D games arrived. Nintendo's machine uses a custom 8-bit Sharp SM83 CPU that can reach 8.3MHz in dual-speed mode for GBC-exclusive games, has 32KB of RAM, and 16KB of VRAM.
This version of Minecraft has limitations, naturally. The textures are turned off by default because, slow as it already is, enabling them turns it into an absolute potato. There also doesn't appear to be any health or inventory system, mobs, or much else beyond the basics.
Players can choose between a generated world and a flat world, continue from a save file, walk around in a recognisably 3D space, look around, break blocks, and place new ones. Game of Tobi even added the Nether, though he admits there isn't much to do there.
The flat world is the better option if you actually want to build anything, while the generated world is the more technically impressive option.
Surprisingly, the project also works on the original monochrome Game Boy. It runs at half the speed because the older handheld has half the clock speed of the Color, and working out what block you're looking at is difficult in black and white, as you'd imagine. But it's still technically playable.
We've seen Doom running on everything from a pregnancy test and Notepad to Teletext and a robot lawn mower, but Minecraft as the new "can it run?" benchmark might become the norm. Game of Tobi has released the ROM for free through Patreon and says a major update for the GBA version is also in the works.