Minecraft: The Unlikely Tale of Markus "Notch" Persson and the Game that Changed Everything (2 page)

Chapter 2

For Beginners

First-time
Minecraft
players
are usually struck by how simplistic it all looks. Ugly, some would say. But those who know their gaming history will feel instantly at home.

If you look closely enough at a computer or TV screen, you’ll see the dots that make up the image. These points—pixels—are the atoms of computer graphics, the smallest indivisible units. Hardware and software developers harbor a kind of love-hate relationship with the pixel. When Apple released the iPhone 4, Steve Jobs made a big deal about the screen, which he called Retina Display. The idea was that each dot on the screen was so small, the resolution so high, that it would be impossible for the human eye to distinguish between separate pixels, and the last remnants of “computer feel” would vanish. Apple had won the war on the pixel.

In other circles, the pixel is lovingly embraced. Extracting maximum meaning from the fewest pixels is an art form as old as computer gaming. The classic arcade game
Pong
is just a square dot that bounces between two flat surfaces, but to the player, it’s obviously a game of tennis. In the first version of
Super Mario Bros.
, Mario was only sixteen pixels tall and twelve pixels wide. However, there is no doubt that the little cluster of colored pixels represents a mustachioed Italian plumber wearing a red cap and suspenders.

Today, the limitations of hardware are no longer a problem, but the logic of the pixel continues to affect the gaming world. Place four pixels in a square and you get a block; pile the blocks on top of each other and you get a tower; arrange them diagonally and you have stairs. The worlds in the
Super Mario
games are still built of blocks, placed side by side to create platforms to stand on, or on top of each other to create walls. Certain blocks can be destroyed, but new blocks can’t be created. And the whole point of
Tetris
is to eliminate blocks by arranging them in rows as they fall slowly down the screen.

The breakthroughs in 3-D graphics did not mean that the blocks disappeared. Instead, the two-dimensional squares became boxes. Block puzzles, in which objects are moved around to fit into predetermined patterns, popped up in all imaginable kinds of games, kind of like homages to the early days of video games when everything was blocky, charmingly clumsy, and square out of pure necessity. But boxes and blocks also lend themselves to building games—we have all played with blocks as kids, piled them on top of each other, toppled them, and arranged them side by side to make patterns.

Minecraft
embraces the pixel. The ground, trees, mountains—and everything else in Markus’s creation—are built of identically sized, one cubic meter blocks. Colors vary, depending on what the different blocks represent. Grass blocks are green on the top and brown farther down; mountain blocks are gray; tree trunks are brown (except for birches, which are black-and-white, as in reality).

But then, this is no paltry little toy world that the player finds himself or herself in, after having seemingly fallen out of the sky for no apparent reason. Huge green spaces stretch out in one direction, a gigantic ocean in the other, and in the distance—how far you can see depends on how powerful your computer is—you glimpse a cloud-covered mountaintop. Amid the trees and quadrangular pigs, cows, and sheep scampering idly around is the player, represented by the blocky avatar, Steve. There is no given direction to move in, no obstacles to climb over nor enemies to defeat. The player receives no instructions whatsoever. Exactly how the world looks changes every time, as the scenery is randomly generated before each new game. The code that generates these worlds is, to say the least, complicated, for while chance determines the appearance of the world, there always has to be natural transitions between mountains, steppes, water, and caves. Markus is the only one who really understands how it all works.

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 same 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 kicked 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.

Markus handled the chaos in his usual manner: he isolated himself. People who were close to the family can’t really remember a time when Markus was seen doing anything other than sitting in front of the computer. Even today, he speaks of the computer, of code and the world of programming, as a sanctuary, a quiet place where he can be alone with his thoughts.

In order to better understand Anna’s behavior, we need to tell her father’s story. Birger was an addict. The drugs—mostly amphetamines—had been a part of Birger’s life before the kids were born, but he stayed clean during their childhood. After Birger and Ritva’s separation, however, it wasn’t long before Birger went back to his old habits. Shortly after that, he left Stockholm and went to live in a small cabin out in the country, a long train trip away from his children.

Birger became increasingly isolated from the rest of the family. Ritva did her best to avoid all contact with him. One day, the family received news that he’d been arrested. He’d been involved in some kind of break-in, they were informed. Birger was sent to prison.

Today, no one in the family really remembers a trial or any specific charges; they had cut all ties with Birger. Even Markus “shut it out,” as he puts it. Much later, after the prison sentence, Markus received a telephone call. He heard his dad through the receiver telling him that he was free.

“Well,” Markus answered, “do you want me to feel sorry for you or something?”

Services at the City Church were beginning to feel less relevant to a teenage Markus. It was no longer so obvious to him that there was a god watching over him. The revelation didn’t come through introspection or soul-searching, but through the rationale of a programmer who contemplates what is reasonable to believe in. Markus didn’t lose his faith; he replaced it with logic.

Just before beginning high school, Markus, like all Swedish students, went to see the school’s guidance counselor. Inside the office, he said he knew exactly what he wanted to do in life: program computer games. Few of his teenage classmates had such a clear ambition; hardly anyone else got their dreams so effectively crushed, either. Make games? Like, as a job? The guidance counselor took it as a joke and recommended the media program because, he told Markus, it had a branch that, unlike computer games, offered a bright future: print media. Dejected, Markus accepted the offer and left. Media at Tumba High School was what he got.

The school did have one major upside. Even though the courses smelled more of printing ink and thick sheets of paper than the digital world Markus loved, there was an elective in programming. Markus went to a total of two classes. During the first one, he ignored the teacher’s instructions and instead programmed his own version of
Pong
. The teacher took one look over Markus’s shoulder and made a quick decision.

“Just come back to the last class and take the test,” he said.

Markus got an A.

During the summer between his first and second years at high school, the fights at home got so bad that Anna moved out. His sister describes her following years as a complete chaos of drugs and self-destructive behavior. From the huffing she’d moved on to heavy drinking. Then she tried amphetamines, the same drug her father was hooked on. Anna became the sole member of the family to maintain any contact with papa Birger during the years he was using. She tells us today how they began to take drugs together and how she became more of a dope buddy than a daughter to him. Markus stayed in touch with his sister throughout this period, but could only look on as she fell deeper into dependency.