Leavitt isn’t the only one thinking along these lines. So is Jens, especially since he began working full-time on Minecraft. Jens is a typical programmer. What he likes best is to sit undisturbed, hunched over the keyboard, with plenty of time to develop the Minecraft world as he pleases. He is also a very creative person. He loves the artistic aspect of making games, programming new monsters maybe, or rewriting the code that determines how waterfalls work. When asked what he is most proud of in the game, he mentions the code he’s written for generating underground caverns. In Version 1.2 of Minecraft, (released in winter 2012), Jens added house cats to the game. He got the idea from thinking about his own cat, Newton, at home in his apartment.
However, as Minecraft grows larger, Jens’s job becomes more about making it easier for others to create and less about doing it himself. On Mojang’s long “to-do list,” two things are currently at the top: new functions for multiplayer games and an official plugin API, an interface that lets players program their own functions into Minecraft without permission from Mojang. These are functions that players have asked about for years, but they are far from the waterfalls, squids, and house cats that Jens otherwise so eagerly talks about.
We ask him what he would most like to do. If he could choose to work only with the pieces of Minecraft that he thinks are the most fun, what would they be? He ponders a bit before answering.
“It’s more fun to create my own stuff. But I’ve realized that I can’t compete with the whole world in coming up with the best features.”
He’s silent for a while, then adds, a little sadly, “We need to get started on things we’ve talked about but never got around to doing. Now that the game is officially finished, it suddenly feels a little urgent. We can’t just fool around any longer.”
Alex Leavitt laughs when he hears about Jens’s thoughts.
“That’s exactly spot on. These developments are new and very interesting. But for anyone working creatively, they are also a little depressing.”
Chapter 12
Too Many for Two Pizzas
In March 2011, about six months after the dinner at Ljunggrens, Carl, Markus, and the others at Mojang took a couple of days off to go to the Game Developers Conference (GDC), in San Francisco. Every year, GDC attracts tens of thousands of people to a weekend devoted to panel discussions, game demonstrations, and networking. Amateur developers, who’ve saved up for months to fly there, mingle with the big bosses from Sony, Microsoft, and Electronic Arts; journalists; and legendary game developers.
Before the trip, they’d considered how they could market their game effectively at the conference. There are many interesting things to see at GDC. To get journalists to listen and business colleagues to notice you, you need to offer something extra. But what? The game’s main character, Steve, had already become somewhat of a cult figure in indie circles, so someone had the idea to simply print Steve’s face on cardboard boxes and make holes for the eyes, thus creating fun, characteristic Minecraft-like headgear. Besides being cheap to produce, the Steve masks could be flattened out and piled up, making them easy to transport to the United States.
To spice up the stunt, Markus and the others tweeted that only those who visited Mojang’s little booth wearing blue T-shirts (the color Steve wears in Minecraft) would be able to take home a Steve mask. Carl ordered a hundred “Steveheads.” It was a lot, he thought, but they could always find some use for the leftovers.
Now Carl stood bent over a boxful of cardboard heads, turned toward the wall in the little booth that Mojang had erected at GDC. Behind him, he heard the buzz from the convention floor, but was busy unpacking and assembling masks. The room was hot, he was sweating, and his back began to hurt. Also, he was worried that no one would show up. True, Minecraft had received a lot of attention in development circles, and Mojang was now making more money every week than most small developers made in a whole year. But at GDC, they were competing for attention with some of the giants of the business. This year game designer John Romero was revealing what had happened behind the scenes when the classic shooter Doom was created. Dustin Browder, the man responsible for some of the world’s most popular strategy games, was talking about the philosophy behind StarCraft 2. At the same time, Nintendo’s top man, Satoru Iwata, was showing the latest entry in the Zelda series, one of Nintendo’s most important game series. Would anyone care about an odd little game from Sweden? Carl focused on the cardboard box in front of him. Regardless, the masks needed to be folded, and as CEO for a small startup company, he had to be prepared to step in where needed.
His anxiety didn’t last long. When Carl stood up to stretch his back, he turned out toward the convention floor for the first time. In front of him was an ocean of people, all with their faces turned toward Mojang’s booth, all wearing blue T-shirts. They looked like one swelling wave of people. Carl didn’t get the chance to count, but it was pretty clear that there were considerably more than a hundred of them. Mojang’s batch of Steve heads was gone in minutes.
During the winter of 2011, Minecraft went from being a well-liked indie game to becoming a sensation. Awards and honors rained on Mojang. Markus and his colleagues returned home from GDC with five shiny trophies in their luggage. Among other things, Minecraft was awarded for Best Innovation, Best Debut, and Audience Favorite. “I am so happy now you wouldn’t believe it,” Markus tweeted on the way home from the conference. On January 12, Minecraft surpassed one million copies sold. Hardly three months later, the number had doubled. Each day, Markus left work tens of thousands of dollars richer.
In the midst of all this, Markus, Jakob, and Carl stood with one single unfinished game on the merit list and a newly founded company to nurture. They had huge ambitions and lots of plans to put into action. Several new people had been hired, and the work on Minecraft continued. But most of all, the trio was just trying to keep a solid foothold in the circus that was spinning around them.
On one occasion, the Internet legend Sean Parker popped in at their headquarters on Södermalm. The man who had started the music site Napster a decade earlier and later became one of the top directors at Facebook and one of Silicon Valley’s best-known investors listened with curiosity to Markus, Carl, and Jakob describe the company they ran together and their plans for the future. When asked if they would consider accepting a small investment, Carl answered politely but firmly no—Mojang didn’t need money. Sean Parker shrugged his shoulders and thanked them, but before he left the office, he asked if the three guys had any plans for the evening. He’d been invited to a party and was looking for some company.
It was not an issue that the party in question was at the celebrity club The Box Soho, in central London. Naturally, Sean Parker had his private plane waiting at Stockholm Arlanda Airport. Markus, Carl, and Jakob tried their best to conceal their excitement as they hopped in a cab to the airport and the American millionaire’s waiting jet. At three thirty the next morning, they stumbled out of the nightclub in London and got on the first available flight home to Stockholm. They got about an hour’s sleep before it was time for the next meeting at the office.
“I feel like James Bond,” wrote Markus on his blog the following day.
Over the summer, Markus and Elin found time to get married. The couple was traditionally attired at the wedding, but Markus kept his black fedora on. Mojang celebrated with a “wedding weekend,” during which each person who bought Minecraft got a free copy “to give to someone you love.”
The publicity surrounding Minecraft also meant that other companies began to contact them. Before GDC, cell phone manufacturer Sony Ericsson had asked them to find time for a meeting while at the conference. On-site in San Francisco, three representatives from Mojang found themselves in an air-conditioned conference room with four directors from Sony Ericsson, discussing a Minecraft version for the Swedish-Japanese company’s cell phones. Seated around the table were Carl; Daniel Kaplan, Mojang’s business developer; and programmer Aron Nieminen, recentl
y hired to develop a Minecraft cell phone app.
Among the others at Mojang, Aron is known as “the smart one.” In a company almost completely composed of programmers, it’s a significant title. He and Markus got to know each other at Midasplayer, where they worked together on a couple of games. Even then, Markus had noticed Aron’s head for math, which made him an unusually fast and effective programmer. When Mojang decided to develop a cell phone version of Minecraft, Markus sought out and recruited his old colleague for the task. Aron is also known for his knitted wool cap, which he wears indoors, outdoors, and at meetings with top directors of big corporations, such as the one he now found himself in.
The Sony Ericsson bosses laid their cards on the table. Later that year, the company would be releasing the Xperia PLAY cell phone, which is specially adapted for games. The Swedish-Japanese company was hard pressed by the competition, and that many Swedes continued to buy their cell phones was poor consolation when Sony Ericsson was losing its grip on the world market. The company heads had a good reason to curse out Apple in particular, whose iPhone had, in just a few years, become the phone everyone wanted. They needed a new start and a big hit, especially among younger buyers.
Mojang had something the directors of Sony Ericsson desperately needed: a cool game that everyone was talking about. What could be better to spark interest for their new gadget than a special version of Minecraft? If Mojang would consider developing the game, Sony Ericsson would gladly pay well for it, the directors told them. The only problem was time. Xperia PLAY would be premiered at the E3 Expo, barely three months away. Would it be possible to put together anything at all, even a playable demo, by then?
The other people in the room turned to Aron, who’d been sitting quietly in his cap, listening. He had only been working at Mojang for a couple of days. Before GDC, there hadn’t been time for him to take even an initial look at the code that ran Minecraft. Now he would have less than ninety days to write a completely new version of the game, more or less from the ground up and for hardware that hadn’t been released yet. Was it even worth a try? The young math genius leaned back in his chair and glanced up at the ceiling. Carl figured that he was calculating silently to himself. The directors of Sony Ericsson cast uneasy looks at one another. A couple of quiet seconds later, Aron looked down from the ceiling toward the others seated around the table.
“Okay, it’ll work,” he said.
Three months later, at the E3 Expo in Los Angeles, Carl looked on contentedly as Sony Ericsson exhibited Minecraft as the big news of the year, complete with a TV ad campaign in which the comedienne Kristen Schaal presented the game. “I made my face out of diamonds once and I passed out because it was so gorgeous,” she said.
One of Carl’s sharpest memories from E3 was when he stood at the top of an escalator and looked out over the showroom floor of the expo. Below him, a huge crowd milled around. He wondered at first where they were going, what new game was being shown that was drawing so many people. Then he caught a glimpse of a familiar black hat in the middle of the crowd. People had swarmed to Markus, who was trying to make his way across the show floor. The creator of Minecraft had become a superstar. E3 was the last time Markus moved about at a conference without a bodyguard at his side.
People who were in Markus’s vicinity at this time describe him as happier than ever. But they also remember how the commotion stressed him out. With success always comes responsibilities, and with their big breakthrough, the Mojang guys were forced into making big, businesslike decisions for the first time. Often, they went against the playful, perhaps somewhat naive profile they most wanted associated with themselves and their company. At the E3 Expo, Mojang reached an agreement with Microsoft to develop a version of Minecraft for the Xbox 360. From a business perspective, the decision was a no-brainer. Around the world, there were close to 70 million Xbox 360 players. Microsoft also runs the online service Xbox Live Arcade, one of the most successful online game stores and the main source of income for thousands of indie game developers. Everyone involved expected Minecraft sales to get a huge shove toward the stratosphere when the Xbox version was released in May 2012. Carl would be able to add another couple of million to Mojang’s already glowing revenue forecast.
On the other hand, it’s difficult not to be reminded of the exact same world of corporate big business that Markus had done everything so far to avoid. The Xbox version of Minecraft was not developed by Mojang, but under license at the Scottish developer 4J Studios. The game was simplified and adapted to appeal to the broader, less geeky audience that Microsoft wants to reach. Specifically, the mystique around the crafting of tools and new minerals would be gone. The absence of documentation of exactly how different things are built in Minecraft was one of the most important reasons that such a large and living online community grew around the game. In the Xbox version, with the simple press of a key, the player can access a guide with all possible combinations laid out on the screen.
Markus also had to promise not to speak as openly about the Xbox or Xperia versions of Minecraft as he’d done with his own earlier version of the game. His constant presence in the community had been a huge factor in the success of the game, but now he was to keep quiet about the details. The reason? Both Microsoft and Sony Ericsson paid for marketing the game and wanted control over what information would reach the public and how.
That particular promise is typical of the dilemmas that now plagued Mojang. Carl mentions accessibility and closeness to players as two of the company’s greatest strengths. But now, interest in Minecraft was so enormous that its creator risked drowning in it. Every day, hundreds, perhaps thousands of questions, opinions, and suggestions inundate Markus. How do you maintain a close relationship with 20 million people?
A part of the solution is named Lydia Winters, online better known by her handle, Minecraftchick. In most contexts, she is completely unknown, whether she takes a walk in Stockholm or in her hometown of Saint Petersburg, Florida. But online, Minecraftchick is something of a phenomenon. Lydia belongs to the same group of Internet celebrities as The Yogscast and Captain Sparklez, but while others are praised for their impressive constructions or theatrics in the game, Lydia has made a name for herself thanks to her personality.
More than 60,000 people subscribe to her video blog on YouTube, where she posts a new video clip each week on a Minecraft theme. The most popular, where she explains the difference between various monsters in the world of Minecraft, has been viewed more than 800,000 times.
References to Minecraft run as a constant thread through Lydia’s films and blog entries, but like many prominent bloggers, she has realized the value of letting her own personality permeate everything she does. The viewer who follows Lydia on YouTube learns more about her thoughts, views, and moods than he or she does about Minecraft. This is an extremely conscious choice. Her motto is to be personal and invite viewers into a dialogue. In her first films, she made a point of mentioning by name everyone who had written or commented on her earlier ones.
Lydia has always wanted to be a celebrity. As a child, she dreamed of becoming a singer or an actor. Growing up, she harbored ambitions of becoming a renowned photographer. Instead it was, more or less by chance, a peculiar game developed in Sweden that made her famous. In the autumn of 2010, Lydia’s doctor informed her that she had an increased risk of developing breast cancer. She decided to start fund-raising for cancer research and started a campaign called “f/stop breast cancer,” after the word for the aperture setting on a camera lens. The intention was for photographers to auction off mentorships and course time and donate the proceedings to research. To drum up interest, Lydia recorded her own video addressing the photographers she admired in which she talked about her plan and asked them to join the campaign. She also created a challenge: if she could raise at least $10,000, she would shave off her hair in front of the camera.
“F/stop breast cancer” became a talking point in the photography world. When it came ti
me to tally the funds, Lydia found that she had raised more than $20,000. The YouTube clip where Lydia shaves off her hair has been viewed, as this book is being written, more than 90,000 times.
“I realized that things I did with video just worked,” she says.
The breast cancer campaign taught Lydia the basics of how you attract attention on the Internet: be real, and find a gimmick. It also gave her an appetite for more of life as an Internet celebrity. If a film where she shaves off her hair could get so much attention, she thought, maybe she could turn it into a career? She decided to start her own YouTube channel. The only question was what the clips would be about. Lydia thought long and hard before some friends suggested Minecraft. It was a game she barely knew of, but that, according to what she had heard, was undoubtedly the next big thing on the web.
Two things made Lydia unique in the world she now entered: she is a woman, which is still relatively rare among gaming enthusiasts on YouTube; and she had never played Minecraft before. Her first films would be about how she took her first, shaky steps in the game. While others uploaded films of their most daring breakneck accomplishments and impressive buildings, she made entertainment out of her lack of experience. Her hair hadn’t grown back out after the fund-raising campaign, and she’d bought a shocking-pink wig that she always put on before she turned on the camera. It swiftly became synonymous with the brand name Minecraftchick.
For Minecraftchick is just that: a brand name. Lydia didn’t start playing Minecraft because she thought the game was fun. Rather, she understood the power and potential of connecting her name early on with a phenomenon that was exploding into popularity.
Minecraft: The Unlikely Tale of Markus Notch Persson and the Game that Changed Everything Page 11
