Could Minecraft be made 20 years ago?

Nope you'd be surprised to hear may 4-5 year old laptop can't run the new versions of minecraft because of its graphics card. Also it requires a lot of RAM due to the infinite world spawn

I'm going to go with no, after a few searches and some experience of playing minecraft at ultra high and ultra low settings it seems a computer from 1994 could not handle it at all.
Minecraft's minimum requirements are: 2.6GHz Intel Pentium processor with integrated graphics and 2GB RAM. Computers 20 years ago were top of the range if they had an 80MHz processor and 4 MB of RAM. Yes! Megabytes!
Further more the basic version of Minecraft is a 200MB file, hard drives in 1994 topped at 500MB. So when you factor in a few game saves and a texture pack, any updates, patches, mods etc. That's half your hardrive used up too!

It actually is high texture. Just because the game contains huge blocks doesn't mean the graphics are bad. Also, the game features a world which is
a) unique everytime you play it and
b) figuratively infinite
so you should rather have a pc which was high end about not more than 3 years ago.

Short answer: No.

Longer answer: Computers 20 years ago had less than 1/1000th the power of today's cheapest PC.

Typical gaming PC from 20 years ago:
* Pentium 200Mhz
* 32MB of RAM
* 1GB hard drive
* SVGA video card with 2MB of RAM -- no dedicated 3D processor, you had to buy a separate video card for that, and only a few games did "real" 3D, as opposed to the fakey-3D you saw in games like DOOM or Quake.

This computer cost $2000, with the 3D card costing an additional $200. And then throw in a swanky 19" SVGA monitor for another $400.