Minecraft: The Unlikely Tale of Markus "Notch" Persson and the Game that Changed Everything (10 page)

Alex Leavitt likes to talk about “narratives” in a more abstract way. In a piece of music, a book, or a more traditionally designed game, the narrative is built in. The composer has designated the melody, the game designer programs the challenges that lie on the way to the next level, the playwright has worked on the dramaturgy, and the actor interprets the role for the camera. In
Minecraft
, a meaningful narrative arises in the interplay between gamer and game.

“When you talk about movies, music, or games, the creative process typically takes place far from the user.
Minecraft
doesn’t work that way. It is better seen as a platform, where the users provide the content,” Leavitt says.

In Creative Mode, designed for players who just want to build without worrying about monsters, this can be taken to an extreme. For a long time, Markus was opposed to such a play mode in
Minecraft
. The whole challenge would vanish, was his reasoning. Where’s the fun in that? However, among players, Creative Mode turned out to be possibly the most popular style of play. Markus listened and, when the beta version of
Minecraft
was released, one of the big innovations was better support for the users who wanted to re-create things such as the Eiffel Tower in full size rather than worry about being attacked by zombies.

That decision, which originated with the players and not with Markus, is perhaps the strongest contributing factor of why
Minecraft
grew into such a phenomenon. Without Creative Mode, few of the most impressive
Minecraft
constructions would have been built—the creations that have done the most to give the game attention and attract new players.

Markus Persson, Carl Manneh, and Jens Bergensten preparing for MineCon 2011. Photo courtesy of Mojang.

The strong sense of commitment that
Minecraft
instills in its players is also a reason that some of the Internet world’s most influential investors have taken an interest in the game. One of them, David B. Pakman, was quick to see the potential of Mojang’s creation. In the 1990s, he had worked for Apple and founded the division that would later create products such as iTunes and the iPod. He has been the CEO of eMusic.com, one of the world’s largest digital music stores, and for the past couple of years has been a partner in the venture capital firm Venrock Associates, which owns significant stakes in several leading Internet companies.

David Pakman discovered
Minecraft
when his kids began playing it after school. He watched, captivated, as they sat for hours in front of the computer, longer than with any other game, and he realized that the odd little creation from Sweden was something extraordinary. Pakman contacted Carl to hear more about
Minecraft
and to ask if he could offer some advice to the newly started company. Since then, he’s been an informal adviser for Mojang on questions regarding business strategy and development. He has also become a devoted
Minecraft
player.

David Pakman is polite in a typically American fashion. He is careful not to criticize anything about Markus’s creation or to describe
Minecraft
with anything but praise. However, on one point he is refreshingly clear: the true value in
Minecraft
is not in the game, its inventor, or anything that Markus or Mojang’s programmers have done. The real value lies in the enormous community of devoted players gathering around
Minecraft
and filling it daily with new content.

Actually, David Pakman doesn’t think
Minecraft
should even be referred to as a game. Markus’s creation has more in common with social networks such as Facebook and Twitter, he feels.
Minecraft
is inherently a social experience. It’s an activity to gather around, and therefore also a reason to socialize. If Facebook can be likened to a kind of hangout spot on the Internet, maybe a bar or a restaurant, then
Minecraft
is the digital equivalent of people meeting to play soccer together.

That point of view has serious implications for the future of
Minecraft
, and for what Markus, Jens, Jakob, and the others at Mojang spend their days working on. There are millions of enthusiastic players out there with ideas about new functions, new monsters, challenges, and experiences to add to
Minecraft
. The developers at Mojang can’t possibly compete with that. If
Minecraft
is to become as lucrative as possible, David Pakman says, it would perhaps be wise if Markus and Jens Bergensten stopped seeing themselves as game programmers and instead focused on developing the game as a social platform.

That’s a job description few game programmers would sign up for, and perhaps Pakman senses that his reasoning is approaching a sensitive subject, because he apologizes:

“It’s hard to say that anything about
Minecraft
should be different, because it hasn’t exactly hurt Mojang to do things as they have. For them, it’s a question of identity. Markus describes himself as a game maker, not as a creator of social and creative platforms, and of course, he should continue to do so,” he says.

Alex Leavitt finds just these kinds of discussions fascinating. Musicians, filmmakers, sculptors, architects, and game designers are all driven by the will to create, he says. To give shape to an idea and put their own stamp on it. Traditionally, the emphasis is on the individual creator—the artistic genius, the gifted musician, the visionary film director, or the game designer—as an elevated and respected person. To Leavitt,
Minecraft
questions that very view of artistic creation.

“How much of what
Minecraft
is today can be traced to Notch and how much is the result of the interplay with the community? There’s a tug-of-war there, between the creator’s vision and the users’ visions, which I think is very interesting.”

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, recently 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.