Minecraft: The Unlikely Tale of Markus Notch Persson and the Game that Changed Everything

by Daniel Goldberg

  This is where some people stop playing Minecraft. Others, however, begin to dig, because every single block in the Minecraft world can be hacked free from the environment and rearranged in a new formation of the player’s design. Put enough blocks in the right places and you have a simple shelter; a few more will turn that shelter into a house—or a barn, a fort, a spaceship, or an exact replica of the Reichstag building in Berlin. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Most people are content with building a simple shelter at first, and in fact, they have to. Because after ten minutes the sun goes down and Minecraft day transitions into Minecraft night, and at night monsters come out. By that time, it’s important to have used enough dirt clods or stones to build something that they can’t get into. A player’s first shelter isn’t usually very impressive, but it only has to be good enough to protect you from the skeletons, spiders, and zombies that wander the dark. Not to mention the most infamous Minecraft monster of all: the Creeper.

  The Creeper is a creature known by its green blockish shape and characteristic black pixel face. When a Creeper approaches the player, it starts to hiss like a lit fuse on a stick of cartoon dynamite; then it grows, blinks white, and finally explodes, taking the player down with it. In October 2010, Markus Persson announced on Twitter that the Creeper is “crunchy, like dry leaves,” and even though such qualities cannot possibly emerge in the low-resolution game world, this description has since become an uncontested part of Minecraft lore.

  The story of how the Creeper came to be is emblematic of how Minecraft was developed. Markus has apologized for the game’s simple (though according to many, ingenious) graphics by saying that he just wasn’t able to create anything more sophisticated at the time, but the Creeper really takes limited invention to a new level—it was made by mistake. While trying to design a pig, Markus mixed up the variables for height and length and the result was a standing form with four smaller blocks for legs. With a little greenish tint and a ghostly face, the monster was complete. Today, the Creeper has been immortalized on T-shirts, in the Minecraft logo, on decals, and with innumerable homemade costumes.

  Minecraft does offer the player a lot of conventional gaming recreation. You can, for example, build portals to parallel dimensions, explore abandoned ruins, fight with a sword, and face dragons in life-and-death battles. But the players who focus on these things are missing the point: Minecraft is about building. After building the first shelter, to protect from the monsters of the night, a deeply rooted human need sets in—the need to build new things, to construct something more advanced, or to just create nicer surroundings. It’s even possible to play in a mode where monsters don’t come out and attack at night and where the supply of resources—sorry, blocks—is infinite. It’s called Creative Mode.

  When those who enter Markus Persson’s world do so without interfering enemies and can invest all their energy in building, their creativity takes off. Placing one block upon another, over and over, can yield the most spectacular creations. The largest ones are created by several players working together for weeks, maybe even months. As listing all of the impressive feats of construction would demand a book of its own, we’ll settle for a small sample:

  THE EIFFEL TOWER. Actually, many versions of Paris’s iconic landmark have been constructed. Some builders, who kept the height down to around 30 meters, have publicly apologized for their lack of ambition and promised that future buildings will be more true to life.

  THE STARSHIP ENTERPRISE, the giant spaceship from Star Trek, re-created block by block in as elaborate detail as the one-meter cubes will allow.

  NOTRE DAME CATHEDRAL, in full scale. The originator proudly declared that the cathedral was created in Survival Mode, with monsters lurking at night.

  AN ELECTRIC ORGAN, fully functional and with several voices, playing Johann Sebastian Bach’s Air on the G String.

  THE TAJ MAHAL, in several versions.

  THE PLANET EARTH. Not full scale, but big enough to astound anyone who appreciates how time-consuming it is to build anything out of cubic meter blocks.

  And this is still just the beginning. Of the many building materials to be found in the world of Minecraft, there is one known for its conductivity: redstone. These blocks are best regarded as a basic programming language, and can be used to build electronic equipment. A player piano, a slot machine, or a fully functional calculator, for example. Or why not a version of Minecraft, played on a computer built inside of Minecraft? Perhaps this is why Minecraft is so unique: the most devoted players choose to exclude everything in it that is reminiscent of more conventional games; they don’t care about killing enemies, exploring caves, or slaying dragons. They only want to build. Bigger, more beautiful, more complicated, and more impressive.

  That doesn’t make Minecraft less of a game, just a very different game. There’s nothing here that can be called a climax; there’s not even any real rules or challenges to get past. Minecraft can be thought of as an enormous sandbox where imagination reigns. The purpose of the game becomes whatever the player decides to create: an even more detailed Taj Mahal, a copy of the Royal Palace in Stockholm, an electric organ with more voices than anyone else has succeeded in putting together, or maybe just a little red cabin with white trim. The game can be made just as simple—or complex—as the player wishes it to be.

  So, if Minecraft isn’t a game in the usual sense of the word, what is it? Maybe it can be thought of as LEGO pieces on steroids; LEGO pieces that you can build larger and more advanced buildings with. LEGO pieces are, of course, sold in kits, intended to be put together according to predetermined designs. But it usually doesn’t take long before all the pieces are mixed up. True creativity isn’t unleashed until they’re lying all over the place.

  In Minecraft, no particular block has any predetermined place in a construction. A black block can be part of the nose of a giant Mickey Mouse statue, included in a ballroom floor, or become part of the foundation of the Great Pyramid of Giza. Just like LEGO pieces, Minecraft gives the player infinite freedom to create, while the potential is strictly set by the characteristics of the raw materials. A block is always a block, but enough blocks can become anything the player can imagine.

  When Markus Persson pulled the lever on the stage in Las Vegas, Minecraft was already a world sensation. In the spring of 2012, his game had more than three times as many players as the population of Sweden. Just a few years before that it was far from obvious that he would become known outside the small circle of initiates who understand and appreciate obscure independent games.

  Many games have been sold in larger numbers than Minecraft—most notably, those released by the large game companies, with their thousands of employees and billions of dollars in annual turnover. Those games are pressed onto the market with worldwide advertising campaigns to shore them up. They’re always sold in boxes on retail-store shelves, like any product, and cost many weeks’ allowances. The themes are, of course, just as magnificent as they are deadly serious: war with automatic weapons, battlefields in fantasy environments, and interactive space sagas for science fiction buffs. These games are polished and photorealistic down to the last detail, and have well-paid Hollywood actors doing the voiceovers. Games that sell will have sequels. Games that do well after that may be turned into franchises. And so on, until every possible dollar has been sucked from the original concept.

  And then we have Minecraft: a game developed by one single person in Stockholm, with graphics so pixely simple that it makes you think of the 1980s. An idea that, if it had been proposed to an investor, would have been immediately sent to the circular file, but that, against all odds, became perhaps the most iconic and talked-about game since Tetris. To understand how it all began, we need to go to Sweden, to an apartment in a suburb of Stockholm, and to a time when nothing looked like it was moving in the right direction for Markus Persson.

  Chapter 3

  “Do You Want Me to Feel Sorry for You or Something?”

  The s
ame scenario greeted Ritva Persson each evening. She’d finished her nursing shift, gone home to the apartment, and walked in the door to the sound of Markus’s keyboard clattering in his room. High school was over, but her son showed no signs of moving out. He showed very few signs of anything at all, in fact. Often, when Ritva returned from a full day at work, Markus had been sitting at his computer the whole time. His hours spent in front of the screen were divided between playing simple, nerdy games and programming his own, just-as-simple, just-as-nerdy games. Even though his creations were nothing extraordinary, Markus liked watching them materialize before his eyes. When he was absorbed in his code, nothing else around him mattered. It would be a gross exaggeration to say that Markus had a life plan, but if there was one thing he was sure of, it was that he liked creating games. His dream was to make a career of it, and ideally, those games would be his own.

  That Markus was shy was no news. Ever since his family had moved from the small town of Edsbyn to the city of Stockholm, he had preferred to keep to himself. Life in the small town had been different. His family moved there when Markus was a newborn, bought some land, and then built a house while Ritva was pregnant with Markus’s little sister, Anna. Markus’s father, Birger, got a job at the national railroad company, and Ritva commuted to the hospital in Bollnäs. Even then Markus loved building with LEGO pieces, but in Edsbyn he also played with the neighboring kids. He was kind of the tough guy in his little group, the one who came up with the pranks that the others went along with.

  Markus remembers how he changed after the move to Stockholm. When he started at the Skogsängs School in Salem, he was put in a class with kids who had already had six months to get to know each other, and it took a while for Markus to fit in. He spent every day alone with his LEGO pieces, which he stored unsorted in an old school desk (the wooden kind, with a flip-up lid). Sometimes, he’d turn the pieces into spaceships and then dismantle them; other times he built a car—just to see if it would survive the trip down a small incline that Markus had chosen for exactly that purpose. If the car made it all the way down, it was branded a success and he would take it apart and use the pieces for something new. Every year as Christmas approached, more LEGO pieces were at the top of his list.

  Markus’s interest was diverted only when his father came home one day from work carrying a large box in his arms. Proudly, Birger opened it in front of the family and lifted out a Commodore 128, the more advanced sibling of the iconic gaming computer, Commodore 64. The family set up the machine in the parents’ bedroom and it immediately became, as far as Markus was concerned, the focal point of the home. Some simple games came along with the new computer, but even more interesting to seven-year-old Markus was the programming instructions, which he read through with Birger guiding him. They sat together in front of the monitor every evening, and it was his dad whom Markus called over to come see the end results of his early exercises in programming.

  The computer opened up a new world to Markus. Just as building with LEGO pieces was more fun than playing with ready-made cars and spaceships, there was something special about entering code in the machine and getting it to perform. Markus’s first original games were text adventures based on a cowboys-and-Indians theme. Perhaps the simplest form of game, a text adventure is more like an interactive novel where the player engages through text than what we’ve come to expect from computer games. For example, the player may be put in front of a house and must choose, by typing a command, between entering through the door, breaking the window, or turning around. Depending on which option he or she chooses, the story unfolds in different ways. The biggest flaw in Markus’s creation was that he didn’t know how to save the code, and so each time the computer was shut down, everything disappeared and the next day he would have to begin all over again. Maybe you need the tenacity of a seven-year-old to continue under such circumstances.

  Whenever Markus wasn’t doing his own programming, he was playing games. The classic puzzle game Boulder Dash, in which the player’s mission is to dig around in caves, watch out for enemies, and collect valuable gemstones for points, was a favorite of his. He also played the action game Saboteur, and the role-playing game The Bard’s Tale (the first game he bought with his own money). As they all were in those days, the games were simplistic creations with pixely graphics and squeaky, hissing digital sounds for music. Markus could sit for hours in front of the computer with his trusty plastic joystick in his grip and his cassette player spinning in the background.

  Markus had no trouble with any of his classes. In fact, school was so easy that he started trying to stay home. It wasn’t like he was cutting classes; Ritva remembers how he’d tell her he had a stomachache or some other vague symptom just serious enough for him to be able to stay home and slip into his parents’ bedroom and to the computer.

  When Ritva’s days off from work coincided with Markus’s “sick” days, she became worried by how engrossed Markus was in the computer. It was the 1980s, the debates about video violence raged on, and something as new as computers—in homes, no less!—was depicted as dangerous for your eyes and your child’s development. He should get out more, she thought. Play soccer, be with the other kids. She wanted to see him come home with rosy cheeks, exhausted from an afternoon of fresh air, not sunk down in front of the computer like a sack of potatoes. She considered limiting his time at the computer, but soon realized it would be like trying to stop an avalanche with her bare hands.

  Instead, she tried subterfuge. When Markus wasn’t at home, she snuck into his room and put up posters of soccer players—no one remembers which—that Markus immediately tore down with a caustic comment that no one else should try to decide what he would have on his walls. Ritva even dragged Markus to the local soccer club. After he had stumbled around the field, missed the balls, and avoided scoring, the coach took Ritva aside. “Nothing will probably come of this,” she remembers him saying. “He’s not going to be a soccer player.”

  Ritva was successful, however, in getting both Markus and Anna to go to church. Though Markus seldom talks about growing up in a religious, evangelical family, his parents had actually met each other through the Pentecostal movement. Virtually every Sunday, the family took the commuter train into the city, got off at the T-Centralen subway station, and walked to the City Church in the center of the city. Markus mostly remembers the services as boring. But he did believe in God.

  Eventually, Markus found a small group of friends at school who also had particular interests. One showed a great musical talent; another was, like Markus, more interested in technology and logical constructions. Everyone in his small circle got good grades and each had a single passion in life. They were, if we may use a tired expression, nerds. At some point in middle school, they added tabletop role-playing games to their list of activities, which got Markus to reveal a new side of his personality. In every other context he preferred to take the backseat, but when it came to creating fantasy worlds, with dragons and elves, he suddenly wanted a central role, to be the game master, the one who made up the stories with monsters and set the challenges for the other players. The boy who usually sat by himself now wanted to join in and have a say, but only about a world that existed in his and the other players’ imaginations.

  When Markus and his sister were around twelve and eleven, their parents divorced and their father moved out. The house became too big and expensive, so Ritva and the kids moved into an apartment. Contact with their father grew increasingly rare. The divorce was a blow to the entire family, but it really hit Markus’s sister hard.

  It began as innocent teenage rebellion. Anna found new friends. She began to comb her hair into a huge Mohawk. Then, one by one, she added the classic punk attributes to her look: the studded black leather jacket, the piercings, the black eye makeup. Some days, she painted sharp arrows out toward her temples. She showed up less and less often at school and at home, the fights were getting violent. Both Markus and his sister remember the time she kick
ed in a door at the apartment. One time Anna, who knew her brother’s sensitive spot, screamed something at him about being a computer nerd, and Markus retaliated by calling her a “punk whore.”

  “I tried to intervene. I thought, If I get through this with a sound mind, I’ll be lucky,” says Ritva today.

  One day, Markus found evidence that Anna’s rebellion had taken a more serious turn. He had snuck into her room, which was something of another world for him. There lay the leather jacket, green hair spray, and records with music and lyrics no parent could understand. On one of the walls, a British flag hung askew. An old teddy bear dangled from the ceiling, a noose around its neck. And in the unmade bed, there lay a badly hidden can with a small spout and a label that said “Butane.” Meant for refilling cigarette lighters, butane was known among teenagers as an easy-to-get and quick-acting intoxicant, if inhaled.

  Markus was floored. Not so much because the can was proof that his sister used drugs (he was a teenager, after all, so drugs weren’t a complete mystery to him) but rather by her choice of intoxicant. At school the talk was of weekend binges, but nothing he’d heard about huffing lighter fluid made it sound very enticing. Apparently the effect was about the same as you’d get from holding your breath for a very long time, but much more damaging. It just didn’t sound like very much fun. Using this particular drug was, in his opinion, stupid and pointless, and he tried to make that clear to her.

  It didn’t work out as well as he’d hoped. Anna screamed, defended herself, and accused Markus of going through her stuff. She stiffly denied the butane was hers, or at least that she huffed it. Of course, Anna had been out of control for a while by then. Ritva had disapproved of the black, studded clothes and the punk rock. And then her daughter’s interest in piercing had developed into a fascination with scarification, a form of tattoo where patterns are cut rather than inked into one’s skin. But the butane was different. Ritva then knew she was losing her grip on the situation, and so she turned to social services for professional intervention.