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

by Daniel Goldberg

  But the simple graphics are not there just to scare off all but the most devoted players. They also give the game’s developer time to focus on other things. Great game play and interesting mechanics are always more important than good-looking graphics, maintains Dwarf Fortress’s creator, Tarn Adams. It’s also the reason he has spent several years adjusting and tweaking the balance in Dwarf Fortress and the nearly infinite number of situations that can arise from the combinations of thousands of different objects, creatures, and occurrences. For the person who takes the time to understand the game’s mysteries, it becomes a world that’s almost got a life of its own. In an interview with the New York Times, Adams tells of his surprise when he discovered that the carp he programmed into the game also turned out to be dangerous monsters with an appetite for dwarf warriors:

  “We’d written them as carnivorous and roughly the same size as dwarves, so that just happened, and it was great.”

  Judging by the popularity of the game—Dwarf Fortress has been downloaded more than a million times—many agree.

  Secondly, Dwarf Fortress is a game that is almost completely open ended. Or rather, the game ends when the player dies, which happens often in the cruel, underground world of dwarves. Other than that, the player decides what to build and how. The game puts a bunch of happy dwarves, tools, and opportunities on the table and waves good-bye with one simple request: have fun. The rest is up to the player.

  Markus had quit his secure job at Midasplayer to do just that. Have fun. He loved the indie scene that had sprung up in the gaming world. While it was hard for him to put his finger on exactly what it was that attracted him, he felt at home there, much more so than as a developer with one of the industry’s large, established studios, that much he knew.

  His favorite online hangout was the game forum TIGSource, a meeting place for indie developers, where Markus (known as Notch in that context) quickly found a group of friends and acquaintances to talk games with. He loved the burning creativity of the indie scene, its focus on new, interesting gaming concepts rather than on elaborate graphics and expensive manuscripts. He liked that each programmer controlled his own projects entirely.

  An outside observer who saw his career at this time would probably shake their head. Markus, who had dreamt of being a game developer since childhood, had had the privilege of working at two of Sweden’s most successful game companies. Avalanche developed Hollywood-like productions, with nearly unlimited budgets. Midasplayer was in the forefront of development and experimented vigorously with the new potential of the web. Still, Markus had hated them both so much that he quit. What was it that rubbed him the wrong way?

  Maybe it was more than just getting free of the boss who told him what to do day in and day out. “Indie” literally means independent, that an individual can develop a game without a large company doling out commissions. Markus’s own interpretation of the concept is slightly different. He feels that indie is a matter of self-image. It’s about creating games for their own sake, where the goal isn’t to make money but to make the best game possible.

  In many ways, that is a more telling definition. Except for some incredible exceptions, the gaming industry differs from other creative businesses in that the foremost game designers are seldom recognized for their work in the way famous musicians or film directors are. In the gaming world, it’s the publishers or studios that are recognized after a well-received game release, seldom the individuals. That’s because game development is, in most cases, a collective achievement. In a project with several hundred programmers, it’s almost impossible to point out just one person as the brain or the visionary behind the whole thing. In the indie scene, on the other hand, a single programmer can put together a game of his or her own and stand behind everything from the basic vision to the implementation. You could say that the indie scene, being closer to artistry than it is to systems development, has, for the first time, given the individual game developer an identity to embrace. Markus has never thought of himself as a Java programmer, graphic artist, or musician. He sees himself as a game maker, plain and simple. The indie scene was the only place where he could be just that.

  While working in web development at Jalbum, Markus resigned himself to the fact that his monthly paycheck wouldn’t be coming from developing games, but it was still better to work on something else during the day in order to be able to invest his evenings and weekends in his own projects. Initially, he had seen Jalbum mostly as his ticket out of Midasplayer. Now, a couple of weeks later, he was actually enjoying it. He had developed a friendly acquaintance with Carl Manneh, the CEO. Markus recalls that his first impression of Manneh was that of a typical businessman, and though Markus wasn’t the least bit interested in business, Carl Manneh’s enthusiasm was impressive. He was young, quick thinking, and had already, at barely thirty years old, run three companies. The first one sold shoelaces, the second was a recording studio in central Stockholm. The third was Jalbum.

  And he ran the company really well, in Markus’s opinion. Carl was an entrepreneurial soul with a good head for the business logic of the Internet. Besides that, he understood Markus’s ambition to develop games. He was even interested, asking questions about projects and offering some of his own thoughts. Carl stood for something completely different from what the old bosses at Midasplayer had. He encouraged Markus and made sure that he had the time and the opportunity to balance his job with what he really wanted to do.

  Besides Dwarf Fortress, there were two other games that fascinated Markus at that time: RollerCoaster Tycoon and Dungeon Keeper. RollerCoaster Tycoon is an amusement-park simulator, where the player builds roller coasters; Dungeon Keeper is a strategy game, where the player digs cave passages and populates them with monsters and ingenious traps as protection against plundering explorers.

  In RollerCoaster Tycoon, Markus liked the ability to build, quickly and easily, original, impressive constructions. He could spend hours dreaming up complicated roller coasters, and he wanted to engender that same creativity in his own project. Dungeon Keepers’ contribution had mainly to do with atmosphere. Fantasy-type, torch-lit catacombs are just as much a cliché in the game world as are space battles and dwarf warriors, but it was still an environment that Markus loved. Few games had captured the nerve-tingling sensation of exploring dark, spooky caves and dungeons as well as Bullfrog’s classic strategy game from 1997, in his opinion. From Dwarf Fortress, he wanted to bring the exciting feeling of depth and life that Tarn Adams’s cult game was so good at conveying. His own game would feel more like a world to explore and to try to survive in than a narrative, segmented into ready-made challenges.

  Then there was Wurm Online of course. The similarities between Minecraft and the game Markus designed with Rolf Jansson a couple of years earlier are unmistakable. In both, the player has almost complete freedom to alter the world according to his or her own whim. Like Minecraft, there are few built-in tasks or challenges to undertake in Wurm Online. The player is expected to create his or her own goals for the game alone or, if so desired, in collaboration with others.

  In the spring of 2007, Markus dropped out of Wurm Online. Rolf had moved from Stockholm to Motala a few years earlier, the two were seeing less of each other, and Markus knew that the big decisions about the game’s development were increasingly in Rolf’s hands. Besides, his Midasplayer job kept him busy.

  Rolf was disappointed. Wurm Online had just begun to pull in enough money to give him a decent full-time salary. The sudden resignation of one of the game’s founders, the friend with whom he’d worked for more than three years, was a huge blow. Initially, Markus had a bad conscience about it—it was hard not to feel like he had left his old friend in the lurch. He retained a small part of his ownership in the shared company, but turned over the rest to Rolf. A Band-Aid on the sore if nothing else, he thought.

  But now, in front of the computer with Dwarf Fortress on the screen, Markus’s thoughts were fully focused on the next project—on
amusement parks, medieval catacombs, and dwarf warriors, that is to say. All that remained was to put together something new and entertaining.

  At first, Markus sketched a game world that was, like many other strategy games, viewed from above. In Markus’s game, the building and exploring would occur in a three-dimensional world a good deal more inviting and easy to understand than that of Dwarf Fortress. But the player would still control the action like an omnipotent god with a mouse, rather than seeing the world from the perspective of one’s avatar.

  That changed a couple of days later. Like most evenings after work, Markus was on the computer when he stumbled upon an indie game he hadn’t tried before. It was called Infiniminer. Markus downloaded the game, installed and clicked it into motion, and then almost fell off his chair. “Oh my God,” he thought. “This is genius.”

  Like Minecraft, Infiniminer involves digging and building. The game is enacted in square, blocky worlds automatically generated before each play. Every individual block can be picked loose from the environment and assembled into something new. Certain blocks, often the ones deep in the ground, contain rare minerals. Others are just dirt and rock to be dug through in the search for treasure.

  Recognize it? No surprise there. For anyone who has played Minecraft, the first encounter with Infiniminer is eerily familiar. The game was developed by American programmer Zachary Barth, and was released in late April 2009, just weeks before Minecraft saw the light of day. The two games’ graphics are nearly identical. There are brown dirt blocks, gray stone, and orange, bubbling lava that runs slowly over the ground.

  Infiniminer was originally intended as a multiplayer game, with different teams competing to collect the most precious minerals in the shortest time. Buildings were used as a way of sabotaging the competitors’ progress. But eventually players discovered that building was more fun than competing for points and they began to spend their time creating houses, castles, and other structures instead. Infiniminer quickly developed a devoted following, which included Markus, and in the spring of 2009, most signs pointed to Zachary Barth’s game being on its way to a breakthrough. But it didn’t get there, because of a particularly unhappy turn of events.

  Barely a month after Infiniminer was released, the game’s source code was leaked onto the Internet. This meant that anyone with enough programming skills could make changes to the game, and soon, innumerable downloadable copies and variations of Infiniminer began cropping up. For Zachary Barth, the problem was not economic—he had never hoped to make a ton of money from Infiniminer—it was that he lost control of how his game developed. Each of the variations of Infiniminer circulating on the Internet had small, incompatible differences. Two players with different versions installed could never be sure that they would be able to play with each other. Zachary Barth’s plans of building a large and living multiplayer community around Infiniminer became impossible. The American programmer made the best of the situation and released Infiniminer as open source code, and gave his blessing to the game’s fans to continue developing it as they wished.

  After Markus became familiar with Infiniminer, he immediately sat down and began recoding his own game. He changed the third-person perspective to a first-person point of view and redid the graphics to make them even more blockish. It was a step away from the traditional strategy game he’d picked from his models and toward a more adventure-oriented setup. After a couple of days of frantic coding, Markus leaned back in his chair, satisfied as he saw the puzzle pieces beginning to fall into place. Building, digging, and exploring took on a totally new dimension when players saw the world through the eyes of their avatars.

  In early May 2009, Markus uploaded a video recording of a very early version of Minecraft on YouTube. It didn’t look like much more than a half-finished system for generating worlds and Markus gleefully jumping around inside it, but still, the essence of it hinted at how the game might look when it was done.

  “This is a very early test of an Infiniminer clone I’m working on. It will have more resource management and materials, if I ever get around to finishing it,” is Markus’s description of the clip.

  Someone on the fringes might regard what Markus did as intellectual-property theft. Without beating around the bush, he revealed where he found his inspiration and even went as far as to call Minecraft a clone of an existing game. But game developers, more than other kinds of artists, often find their starting point in an existing idea that they then work on, change, and polish. All studios, large and small, keep tabs on what their competitors are doing and frequently borrow from their games. Still, game developers seldom accuse others of plagiarizing. Almost all platform games originate from the mechanics that Nintendo put in place in the first Super Mario Bros., released in 1985. And more or less all role-playing games build on the structure that was developed in games such as The Bard’s Tale. That’s why Zachary Barth refuses to single out Markus as a thief. He even speaks about how he himself used Team Fortress 2 and the indie game Motherload as inspiration for Infiniminer. Actually, he’s tired of the constant questions about if he feels ripped off considering the millions of players and dollars that Minecraft has pulled in.

  “The act of borrowing ideas is integral to the creative process. There are games that came before Infiniminer and there are games that will come after Minecraft. That’s how it works,” says Barth.

  About this time Markus, after discussing the matter with some friends at the TIGSource forum, decided to call his game Minecraft. The name was a combination of the words mine, for mining ore in shafts, and craft, as in building or creating something. The name is also a wink at Blizzard’s strategy games Warcraft and StarCraft, and the enormously successful online role-playing game World of Warcraft. Initially, the game had the subtitle Order of the Stone, a reference to the online series Order of the Stick, of which Markus was a fan, but that idea was scrapped before the game was released to the public.

  Markus was convinced that he was onto something big, but convincing the world around him of the excellence of his game was not so easy. A bunch of different ideas merged into Minecraft, and explaining them without any kind of demonstration was complicated. Over coffee with his mom, Markus attempted to describe in sweeping gestures the new project he was working on. He told her about the building, the exploration, and the atmosphere, and then explained how the game would be both easily accessible and complicated at the same time. Maybe it could develop into something great, he thought aloud. Maybe he should give notice at work and focus entirely on Minecraft. Ritva smiled slightly. It sounded like a really good idea, she’d said to her son. But maybe he should start by working only part-time? It wasn’t entirely easy to support oneself on game development alone. He’d said that himself before.

  In truth, Markus’s idea was all Greek to her. Plus she remembered the year after high school, when he didn’t look for work, didn’t study, and barely went outdoors for days at a time. What would happen if he became just as obsessed with another project, something that could be just as important to him as building with LEGO pieces had been when he was in elementary school but that earned him next to nothing? She was worried, and yet, she saw how his eyes lit up when he talked about the game. He became confident, self-assured.

  Elin better understood what Markus was thinking. She was among the first in the world to try out a working version of Minecraft. As soon as it was ready, Markus sent it to Elin and asked her to play. When she logged in and started up the world, what she got was basically a tech demo—a world of blocks beneath a blue sky. But Markus’s intentions were immediately evident to her. A couple of minutes of digging and building and she was entrenched in the game.

  “This is SO much fun!” she said to her boyfriend.

  From that moment on, Elin was Markus’s game tester. Every time he added a new feature to Minecraft, he sent her the latest version. Markus often stood watching over Elin’s shoulder while she played, listening intently to her comments. If Elin liked something
he’d done, he seemed to reason, the rest of the world would probably like it, too.

  Even before Minecraft was shown to the public, Markus had made a couple of important decisions that would have a huge influence on the game’s continued development. First, he wanted to document the development openly and in continuous dialogue with players, both his semiprofessional colleagues at TIGSource and any others who might be interested. Markus updated his blog often with information about changes in Minecraft and his thoughts about the game’s future. He invited everyone who played the game to give him comments and suggestions for improvements. In addition to that, he released updates, in accordance with the Swedish saying “often rather than good” (meaning someone who prefers spontaneity over perfection). As soon as a new function or bug-fix was in place, he made it available via his site, asking players for help in testing and improving it.

  Second, Markus knew from the beginning that he eventually wanted people to pay for Minecraft. In the back of his mind were his talks with Jakob at Midasplayer and their dream of starting their own game studio, so it seemed only natural to put a price on his game. And it was better to do it as soon as possible.

  It doesn’t sound very controversial, but the fact is that Markus’s decision went against most of the current trends in the gaming and Internet world. Many technology prophets talk about the road to riches on the web being through charging as little as possible for your products, preferably nothing at all. At most of the well-known Internet companies, for example Google and Facebook, the cash comes mainly from ads. In the gaming industry, the trend points to “micropayments.” Rovio-developed Angry Birds, which costs one dollar from the App Store, is maybe the best-known example. Another is the Swedish-developed online game Battlefield Heroes. It’s a variation on the popular game that’s free to play, but players can buy new equipment and better weapons for a few dollars each.