We find a similar example in the shabby, gray concrete giants of the Swedish government’s housing projects in Stockholm’s suburbs. Many of these properties, developed in the sixties and seventies, are now badly in need of renovation. Politicians argue over the best way to finance the task and about how the areas should look when finished. And there’s at least as much squabbling about how the tenants in these areas will be able have their say in the design of their buildings, parks, and streets. Through an initiative of the company Svensk Byggtjänst, property owners in Fisksätra, Nacka, and Södertälje, south of Stockholm, have used Minecraft to help them solve these problems. The project was introduced under the name “My neighborhood.” A Minecraft server was created, accessible to anyone. With the help of Mojang, Svensk Byggtjänst contacted experienced Minecraft builders, who began to construct a typical Swedish mass-produced suburb inside the game. Everything in it is made of the typical Minecraft blocks, which makes it easy to hack away pieces and put them somewhere else. Thus, one part of the neighborhood can get a makeover or one building can be torn down and replaced with another.
With the blocky suburb in place, Svensk Byggtjänst invited young people and put them in front of computers with a server connection. The participants were set free to build or tear down as they pleased, or to “visualize ideas,” as the sponsors prefer to call it. Since then, several similar seminars have taken place. The construction company Telge-Hovsjö was one of the first to take heed of this odd way of city planning and other projects, and plan to be the first company in the world to use sketches and drawings done in Minecraft in their formal construction documents for a future project.
Joel Levin loves examples like these. He thinks of Minecraft as a Trojan horse. The game lets him sneak education into an environment where the students feel at home. Similar to the way Minecraft makes it more fun to plan cities, it helps Levin get students to show an interest in subjects they would ordinarily tire of after a couple of minutes. In academic language, this is called “gamification”: the use of the motivation techniques and reward structures that are built into all good games to enliven tasks that would otherwise be insufferably boring.
Carl Manneh is quick to bring up both MinecraftEdu and the construction project in Fisksätra when he talks about Minecraft. He is clearly proud to be a part of what Santeri Koivisto and Joel Levin are doing. There are probably several reasons for this. Before he entered the Internet business, Carl worked as a substitute teacher, so he knows how difficult it can be to motivate bored students to care about what happens on the whiteboard in front of them. If MinecraftEdu is successful, it would be a huge step in making Mojang’s enormous success about more than just entertainment. Creating the year’s most talked-about and lucrative Internet company is one thing. Changing everyday life for students and teachers in classrooms around the world is something entirely different. Much more important, some would say. Maybe a small part of Carl agrees.
Chapter 14
Becoming a LEGO
Markus was tired but happy when he returned home from the E3 Expo in Los Angeles. He’d been surrounded constantly, mingling with gamer fans and business VIPs alike. Still, it was nice to be back home. Everything was going exactly as he’d hoped at Mojang. Everyday life had settled in at the office. Normal mornings at the Mojang premises didn’t completely live up to the playhouse picture suggested by its interior design. There was music on low in the background and the programmers were focused at their computers, the graphics people hunched over their screens.
That’s not to say the workplace was always quiet. Discussions could become heated in the office and, thanks to the company’s maximally liberal Twitter policy, reach far beyond the building. One major topic of debate during 2011 concerned a dragon. Most classically designed computer games have an endgame boss, the biggest, most difficult and final monster to be conquered before the game is completed. Markus felt that Minecraft needed something like that. Fans had been clamoring for an end boss for a long time, and in an interview Markus had said in passing that you should be able to “kill a dragon or something.”
Jens lashed out, one of the few instances when the two didn’t agree about how the game should develop. Dragons are (and this is a view he stolidly stands by to this day) a boring and unimaginative choice. But a dragon it would be. By Minecraft standards, the one they designed was an impressive creature—large, black, and with wings that, in spite of their blocky shapes, moved softly up and down when the creature flew.
Most of the employees were on vacation in the summer. The spring had been intense, and only a few months later it would be time for another trip to the United States, when the finished version of Minecraft would be released at MineCon in Las Vegas. A lot needed to be done before then.
Jakob had taken his family to Gotland to relax. At MineCon, he and the others would also show a playable version of Scrolls for the first time. The game had already received a ton of attention in the games press. A lot of people wanted to know what Mojang would do after Minecraft. Plenty of work on the new game remained; Jakob knew that many long days at the office awaited him when he returned from his vacation.
In another part of the world, there was already feverish activity concerning Scrolls. In the city of Rockville, Maryland, a group of lawyers hired by the game company ZeniMax had had turned their gaze toward Jakob’s new game. ZeniMax is a large publisher, with many well-known game studios in its stable. Among them are id Software, which developed legendary games like Doom and Quake; and Bethesda Softworks, with the role-playing series The Elder Scrolls on their merit list.
The Elder Scrolls-series has occupied a special place in the hearts of many gamers since the first part was released in 1994. The games are gigantic, meticulously detailed adventures in a fantasy world, always created with player freedom as the guiding design principle. There are powerful dragons, armored knights, and flame-wielding magicians, loads of secrets to discover and treasures to plunder. In an Elder Scrolls game, players explore the world at their own pace and can choose the order in which to accept tasks and challenges.
The series is one of Markus’s favorites, and it’s fair to assume that The Elder Scrolls was among the inspirations when he and Rolf Jansson began designing Wurm Online. Now Bethesda was working on finishing the next Elder Scrolls game, titled Skyrim. Just like hundreds of thousands of others, Markus and Jakob had planned to spend a good part of the winter in front of their screens with the game.
But the fact that Mojang had landed in the sights of ZeniMax had little to do with Skyrim, and even less to do with Minecraft. The corporate lawyers had noted the similarity between the name Mojang had chosen for its next project and their series. Too similar, they felt, and decided to do something about it.
Jakob had just returned from vacation when a letter from ZeniMax arrived at the office. It contained a document fifteen pages long and written in complicated legalese. But the central message was unmistakable. According to ZeniMax’s lawyers, Mojang was not allowed to name its game “Scrolls.” It was so similar to the name of Bethesda’s series that they regarded it as a trademark infringement. Change the name, the American company advised them starkly. If they didn’t, the case would go to court.
This wasn’t the first time the American company had been in contact. Earlier in the fall, Mojang had applied for a trademark for the title Scrolls. It had been mostly to test the waters. Neither Jakob nor anyone else at Mojang had any idea whether you could really trademark a single word. It didn’t take long before ZeniMax contacted them asking about the project. Even then, the Americans made it clear that they considered the title a problem. From ZeniMax’s point of view, the two names—Scrolls and The Elder Scrolls—were too similar.
Markus and Jakob wanted to avoid a conflict. They immediately suggested a subtitle for their own game. They would even consider skipping the trademark (but still call their game Scrolls), if it would get ZeniMax off their backs. The American lawyers rebuffed both suggestions, but didn’t send an
immediate counteroffer. Everything went quiet after that. Jakob figured the issue was settled. The letter from ZeniMax he now held in his hand proved otherwise, beyond the shadow of a doubt.
The board of Mojang—Markus, Carl, and Jakob—met to discuss what they should do about it. They decided that the best defense is a good offense. Just folding and “letting them kick us around,” as Jakob puts it, was never an option. Mojang’s next game would be named Scrolls, no matter the cost.
Initially, it was difficult for them to take the lawsuit seriously. In a blog posting, just a few weeks after the threat of a lawsuit dropped through the mail chute, Markus suggested another way of resolving the conflict.
“I challenge Bethesda to a game of Quake 3. Three of our best warriors against three of your best warriors. We select one level, you select the other,” he wrote in a blog post. “If we win, you drop the lawsuit. If you win, we will change the name of Scrolls to something you’re fine with.”
He never received an answer. Another time, Carl tried to resolve the whole deal with an e-mail to Robert Altman, the top boss at ZeniMax. Can’t we just meet and try to work this out, he suggested, offering him a cup of coffee.
“I’m not interested in coffee,” was the short reply.
In September, ZeniMax submitted its formal complaint to Stockholm’s district court. Many of the developers who worked for Bethesda were ashamed of their mother company’s actions, especially since they—like most others in the business—were full of admiration for what Mojang had done with Minecraft.
“This is a business matter based on how trademark law works, and it will continue to be dealt with by lawyers who understand it, not by me or our developers,” said Bethesda’s marketing director, Pete Hines, in an interview. Markus expressed himself in similar terms.
“I am a huge fan of Bethesda’s work, and I am looking forward to Skyrim more than I am any other game this year,” he wrote in an e-mail to the gaming site Kotaku.com.
It was Carl’s job as CEO to solve the problem, but it had the greatest impact on Jakob. When he and Markus had started Mojang the year before, the two projects came side by side: Scrolls from Jakob and Minecraft from Markus. Markus’s game concept was already one of gaming history’s biggest hits, but Jakob’s contribution hadn’t even left the drawing board yet. Jakob had begun to feel anxious. How would Mojang’s millions of fans—who loved Minecraft more than any other game—receive his project? Eventually, the commotion around Markus’s game would subside. Then it would be important to have something new to show.
It was not likely that Scrolls would be as big a success as Minecraft. Everyone involved was careful to stress that. But it was important to show the world that Mojang was more than a one-hit wonder. Jakob was convinced that Scrolls would do the job. If it flopped, he would have to take the blame.
For Jakob, the legal process with ZeniMax came to represent everything he hated about the established game industry. As a child, he’d dreamed of becoming a lawyer, but his dealings with the Zenimax legal team felt nothing like like the heroic agents of justice he remembered from his childhood evenings in front of the TV.
Jakob Porser. Photo by Elin Zetterstrand.
Trademark disputes are a dime a dozen in the business world. This case would probably have passed unnoted if it hadn’t involved two such different parties. In one corner stood Mojang, the most highly praised indie developer in the gaming world. In the other, the huge company, ZeniMax, with several enormously popular games in their portfolio and an army of attorneys at their disposal. You might see the battle between Mojang and ZeniMax as pure harassment, a giant company using legal brawn to protect its revenue and repress a startup. That was exactly how the employees at Mojang felt, and it was the story that created headlines in the gaming press during the summer.
Or you could see it as Mojang’s first real encounter with the world of big business, which they inescapably were becoming part of. Regardless of Markus’s self-image, ZeniMax had long since ceased to view Mojang as a harmless little indie company. Mojang was pulling in several million dollars and was one of the gaming world’s most talked-about companies. For ZeniMax, the creators of Minecraft weren’t innocent startups. They were perfectly valid competitors.
In October, just weeks before MineCon in Las Vegas, Mojang won an important first victory. The Stockholm District Court threw out ZeniMax’s demand for a so-called temporary injunction, which would have prevented Mojang from using the name “Scrolls” during the term of the court case. In the ruling, the court states that the names are not easily confused. ZeniMax could have withdrawn its charges then, but the publishing company stuck to its guns. Now what remained was either a trial or a settlement.
As the court case dragged on, the attention surrounding Minecraft brought other things forward that Markus would have rather not thought about. In the autumn, Aftonbladet, a Swedish daily tabloid, published an interview with Rolf Jansson, Markus’s old friend from his Wurm Online days. They only saw each other sporadically nowadays. His friendship with Rolf was just one of many things that Markus had been forced to put on the back burner in order to make time for everything concerning Minecraft.
Rolf still lived in Motala and now worked full-time with Wurm Online. Compared to most indie developers, he was doing quite well. The number of paying Wurm Online players was growing slowly but surely and had recently passed three thousand. Rolf made enough money to work full-time with the game and had even hired two more people at his firm. But he did miss working with Markus, and the success of Wurm Online did pale in comparison to that of Minecraft. About this time, Markus’s game was attracting more new players daily than Rolf Jansson had scraped together in almost eight years. But Wurm Online was the game Rolf had always dreamed of creating; working on your dream is something only a few game developers can actually achieve.
The article in Aftonbladet painted a picture of Markus screwing over Rolf: Markus had stolen the best ideas from Wurm Online and taken them to his own game. Rolf never says it outright, but readers still get the impression that Markus’s earlier collaborator was swindled out of both money and success. Markus comes across as being indifferent; he briefly answers only two of the reporter’s questions and then explains his desertion as frustration over not being able to influence Wurm Online in the way he wanted.
The article stirred up strong emotions in both Markus and Rolf. They discussed it in a telephone conversation that ended on a bad note. Looking back both say that Aftonbladet’s article presented an inaccurate image of reality, but neither can really say in what way. Markus is satisfied with stating that things were “taken out of context.” Rolf is very reluctant to answer questions about the whole thing, but offers this comment over the phone: “I am really glad that Markus has gotten rich. That comes from the heart. On the other hand, I’m not completely at peace with how it happened. I can’t think of anything else to say.”
Today, their friendship is complicated. Before, they could talk computer games for hours. Now they talk a couple of times per year, mostly on the phone, most often about business. Markus is still a partner in the company that runs Wurm Online. He is on the company board, but is careful to emphasize that he has no creative influence over the game. Their friendship has been replaced by a more “professional” relationship, as Rolf describes it. It’s obvious that as Markus’s success has grown, the two have drifted farther away from each other.
Mojang was founded on a pronounced indie mentality. The company would be small and agile and would only spend time on projects in which the employees were interested. That attitude was central to the vision that Carl and the others expressed together. It was sort of a mission statement, formulated shortly after the dinner at Ljunggrens when the company was founded: Mojang was to become the world’s most influential indie developer.
As the CEO of a successful, quickly growing company, it’s surprising that Carl would be supportive of such an ambition. Their central vision said nothing about revenue, growth
, high profit margins, or new markets—nothing about success in business. It’s entirely possible to be influential without ever becoming rich (just ask Franz Kafka), and it must be said that Mojang rejects the easy money. A comparison with perhaps the most well-known cell-phone game in history, Angry Birds, illustrates that quite clearly. It was very deliberately developed into a giant industry with a steady stream of sequels, stuffed dolls, and a planned stock market introduction. Rovio, the company behind the game, exploited its new-won victory when sales shot up, and redefined itself from a small company with a handful of employees to a well-oiled machine, driven with laser precision by business-development principles. Nothing says that Mojang couldn’t go in the same direction.
Jakob snorts when Rovio is mentioned, calling it a one-trick pony.
“They only have one game idea and that’s actually a copy of an existing game, where they’ve inserted graphics from an old project. They had one hit, and now they’re milking it like crazy.”
There are two main reasons why Mojang’s view of growth is different. First of all, the company was started around an existing success. The three owners decided which direction the company would take and used their own capital to take it there. Second, you need to take a look at who started Mojang. Jakob and Markus have never made a secret of their complete lack of interest in money matters. They are almost proud of not comprehending money, contracts, and things they associate with men in suits and ties. Carl seldom wears clothes different from what the others wear, but at the end of the day, it is still his job to be that man in the suit and tie. Markus has described the CEO’s job this way: to take care of “the boring stuff,” because Markus wants to stay busy with the fun stuff.
That’s why there is no planned sequel to Minecraft or new levels available for download at an extra cost. According to the extant logic of the game business, the plans for Minecraft 2 would have already been under way and there would be many expansion kits to get existing customers to pay once more. Instead, completely separate games, such as Scrolls, are growing within the walls of the company.
Minecraft: The Unlikely Tale of Markus Notch Persson and the Game that Changed Everything Page 13
