Minecraft: The Unlikely Tale of Markus "Notch" Persson and the Game that Changed Everything (3 page)

Markus and Ritva were now alone in the apartment. Markus had graduated from high school in Stockholm in the late 1990s, when the dot-com bubble was at its greatest and pretty much any teenager with basic computer skills could get a job at a hyped-up web agency with fancy offices. Markus’s problem was not that he didn’t understand his opportunities, but that he was all too aware of them. He tried working at a web agency for a short time, but thought the programming tasks were boring, so he quit. There were always other jobs out there, he figured. And there were, until the first signs that the expected giant profits from the new generation of IT companies would never materialize, and the bubble burst.

Suddenly, being a gifted, slightly introverted teenager with mounds of programming knowledge but no formal education wasn’t such a promising position to be in. But then, Markus had never wanted to be a run-of-the-mill programmer at a run-of-the-mill company. He wanted to make games.

“I’m going to get rich,” his sister remembers him saying once. “And then I’ll take you on a helicopter ride.”

But he had no plan to make it happen.

An unemployed Markus started to feel quite comfortable living at home with his mom. With both his dad and sister gone, there was plenty of room, and the place was quiet enough for him to sit undisturbed at his computer.

Ritva remembers him saying once, “Mom, I’m going to live with you my whole life.” She could see how the years would pass without Markus getting either a job or an apartment.
Oh, my God, what a nightmare
,
she thought. But she just smiled, and her son shuffled back into his room and sat down in front of the computer.

Ritva didn’t try to throw Markus out, but she did try to at least get him out of the house during the day. Every day, she opened the free newspaper,
Metro,
and carefully read through the ads for courses. When she saw one that was for programming, she signed him up without asking him if he was interested. After a few failed attempts, she finally got Markus to go to a short course on the programming language C++.

Markus also continued working on his own games, and he’d come a long way since his first attempts with text adventures. He had become a skilled amateur coder, experimenting with small, simple games that tested new, original ideas. Markus started competing in game-development contests, where the goal was to develop a game in a short time using the least amount of code possible. It forced him to think economically—just the kind of fast-paced programming he liked so much. The aim was not to make money, and he didn’t. It was more about getting attention and recognition from other amateur developers.

Luckily enough, the IT industry soon began to rise from the ruins of the crash. Markus took an opportunity to work at the fringes of the gaming industry, at a company called Gamefederation. It was not a game-developing company—Gamefederation worked with systems for game distribution. But now and then, Markus would get the chance to create small game prototypes in order to test a system’s functions. These creations haven’t been saved for posterity, but for the first time Markus was getting paid for something that at least resembled game programming, and that, he liked.

When Markus was hired at Gamefederation, another developer, Rolf Jansson, had already started working there. Rolf quickly became Markus’s closest colleague, despite their drastically different backgrounds. Unlike Markus, Rolf already had substantial work experience. Before ending up at Gamefederation with Markus, he had been a consultant at IBM—a dream job for many. The pay had been great and, being a successful employee of one of the world’s largest IT companies, his future would have been secure. Nevertheless, Rolf, just like Markus, dreamed of working with games.

Rolf remembers Markus as being shy and quiet, but a nice guy. It was when the two of them began talking about games that Markus lit up, and they had a lot to talk about. Markus got Rolf to play
Counter-Strike
, and Rolf showed Markus his favorite games. Soon, the two of them began staying late after work, playing multiplayer games on the company’s network. Sometimes they sacrificed a lunch and went over to The Science Fiction Bookstore, in Stockholm’s Gamla stan (the Old Town), where they bought cards for Magic: The Gathering. Between game sessions, they would talk at length about what was missing from the games available on the market, and together they could envision the perfect game and figure out what it was that the next hit game needed.

Markus stayed at Gamefederation for four years. He then got the chance to enter the game industry for real when he interviewed for a then-unknown company, Midasplayer. The little he’d heard about it was promising. At Midasplayer, each developer was responsible for his or her own games. On top of that, Markus liked that the company focused on making small games to be played online. It sounded like what he’d been doing on his own for years without earning a cent. Everything seemed to be falling into place; they just needed to hire him.

Chapter 4

Games Worth Billions

“Do you know
ActionScript?”

The job interview at Midasplayer began really badly. Markus couldn’t dodge such a direct question, and the only honest answer was a straight no. He had experimented with most existing programming languages used to create small online games, but not ActionScript. Unfortunately, that was the only one used at the company where he wanted to work.

Markus got the job anyway, an indication of how quickly Midasplayer was growing at the time. Each day, the line of commuters from the subway station to Midasplayer’s main office on Kungsholms Square in Stockholm grew longer. The year was 2004 and the company was just a year old.

Markus had to spend his first week at his new job learning ActionScript before he could begin working on his own projects. He mostly sat quietly staring into his screen, partly because he was focused, and partly because he had quickly noticed that the powers that be at his place of work were nothing like him. He began, for the first time, to glimpse the contours of a gaming world quite different from what he had dreamt of since childhood.

To understand how he felt, you need to lift your gaze a bit and look more closely at the professional gaming industry. In Stockholm, one company exemplifies the Goliaths of that world better than anything else.

On the other side of the inner city from Midasplayer’s offices are the headquarters of the game studio DICE. On dark evenings, boats entering Stockholm from the south are greeted by a brightly lit neon sign displaying the company’s logo, high up on the glass facade of the building next to the Slussen locks. At that exclusive address, nine floors above the street, some of Sweden’s most successful export items have been created. From inside the offices you can view Gamla stan and the sea approach to Stockholm through panoramic windows.

DICE is owned by Electronic Arts, one the largest video game publishers in the world. Daily life there is markedly different from the amateur programming that Markus was used to. The company’s games are products, adapted to target audiences down to the smallest detail, backed by billions of dollars in marketing, and delivered with elaborate planning in order to boost the parent company’s quarterly profits and stock market value. DICE’s cash cow is the game series
Battlefield
, a realistic, tactical war simulator that has sold over 50 million copies. The first part in the series,
Battlefield
1942
, was released in 2002. Since then, DICE has honed and tweaked the concept in sixteen different sequels, with wars being alternately staged in Vietnam, the Europe of WWII, and a fictional future conflict between the United States and Russia.

In late 2011, the company was gearing up to launch its latest title in the series:
Battlefield
3
. The release would be an internationally acclaimed event in the gaming world, as elaborate as a major Hollywood premiere, coordinated by an international team of marketers and PR experts. For several months, expectations were raised with ad campaigns and articles in gaming magazines. Particular emphasis was put on the game’s new, completely redesigned engine, which allowed DICE to create a more realistic war experience than ever before. “All the sights, sounds, and action of real-world incursions,” the ads bragged. In trailers, backed by grinding heavy-metal guitars, virtually photorealistic soldiers could be seen rushing around through urban environments that were promptly shot to pieces.

At the same time, the stock market was massaged with gilt-edged information about the new game. Electronic Arts’ well-dressed CEO, John Riccitiello, spoke often and inspirationally about how
Battlefield
3
would push up Electronic Arts’ market value. The competition was
Call of Duty
, a war game from archrival Activision Blizzard.

“
Call of Duty
did 400 million dollars in revenue on day one. Battlefield 3 is designed to take that game down,” John Riccitiello told the audience at the Ad Age conference in New York.

Battlefield
3
was released simultaneously in tens of thousands of game shops the world over. Many of the most devoted fans stood in line for hours, and several stores stayed open for midnight launches. In preparation for the premiere at the Webhallen video game store in Stockholm, extras dressed as soldiers entertained the waiting crowd with fights and staged robbery attempts. DICE employees celebrated the release by renting out one of Stockholm’s oldest and finest restaurant-nightclubs and throwing a giant party, where they toasted each other with champagne while the pop star September entertained them.

During its first week in stores,
Battlefield
3
sold more than 5 million copies. The financial people at Electronic Arts established that the game had added about $370,000 to the company’s coffers—significantly more money than
Avatar
, one of the most lucrative films ever, earned during its first weekend in the theaters. For the uninitiated, the numbers may seem sky-high, but they were exactly in line with what the bosses at Electronic Arts had predicted.
Battlefield
3
was just more proof that computer games are big business.

In 2010, computer games were sold to the tune of $46.7 billion. That’s more than double the total amount of music sold, $16.4 billion. If you believe the industry’s own statistics, the consumer demographics are a far cry from the usual picture of gamers as mainly young men and boys. Four out of ten players in the United States are women. Three out of ten are over fifty years old, and only one out of ten is a boy under seventeen years old. Today, gaming is one of the world’s largest, most appreciated, and most demographically widespread forms of entertainment.

The CEO at DICE at the time of
Battlefield 3
’s release was Karl-Magnus Troedsson. For over twenty years, his career has run parallel to the development of the Swedish gaming industry. In the late 1990s, right after completing his studies at the college in Gävle, he was hired by the game company Unique Development Studios (UDS). The first game he worked on was
Mall Maniacs
, an advertising game developed for a Swedish grocery store chain and McDonald’s, in which the player’s task was to fill a shopping cart with advertised items as fast as possible. A couple of years later, he began working at Digital Illusions, which later became DICE. Sweden, particularly the Stockholm region, had by then established itself as one of Europe’s most prominent centers of game development. Today, Swedish games pull in almost $1.4 billion in yearly sales for the large companies. A big chunk of that money goes to DICE.

Today, the situation is very different from the experimental workshops of the early years. Karl Magnus Troedsson calls it “mature” and “more professional.” Others would probably use words like
cold
and
unforgiving
. Enormous sums of money are invested in each game that actually makes it to market, and the demands on a successful studio like DICE are immense. New games have to place either first, second, or third on the ranking lists. Anything less is considered a flop.

The largest games publishers, such as Electronic Arts, are listed on the stock exchange and run, like other huge companies, according to quarterly reports and the expectations of the market. They navigate using Excel spreadsheets full of sales prognoses and cost analyses. Publishers like Electronic Arts are the most powerful in the video game industry. They finance the game developers’ projects and decide whether or not a game will get produced. They also control the enormous budgets needed to market a popular game—a general rule is that just as much money is spent on advertising and marketing as on the programming itself and, in extreme cases, such as that of
Battlefield
3
, several times more. And it’s the publishers alone who have access to the distribution and production contacts that are needed to press millions of CD or DVD disks and then ship them to stores throughout the world. The five largest game publishers—Nintendo, Sony, Microsoft, Activision Blizzard, and Electronic Arts—accounted for about 70 percent of the turnover in the industry in 2008.

The enormous budgets and gruesome deadlines that mark large productions engender predictability and standardization. That doesn’t necessarily mean bad quality. For example,
Battlefield
3
has been praised as one of the most impressive games of 2011. There is, however, less room to test new ideas. For a nonplayer, there is very little that separates
Battlefield
1942
—the first edition of DICE’s series, released in 2002—from the latest version. Huge productions tend, like giant Hollywood films, to build upon proven concepts that appeal to as large an audience as possible. Sports games, which can be updated each year to reflect the latest season’s player lineups, are among the most profitable in the business and are produced assembly-line style by the big publishers.

From the point of view of publishers, experimental game concepts are risky. Why try something different when another
Battlefield
with better graphics and even more impressive explosions is almost guaranteed to sell at least as well as its predecessor? New ideas mean untested ground and therefore greater risk that the investment won’t pay off. Only a fraction of the thousands of game productions that are initiated each year ever reach the top of the sales-ranking lists. Though it’s the publishers taking the economic risk, the resulting failure or success is most felt at the development level. New opportunities materialize for the studios that succeed, then more money from the publisher and greater freedom to determine the tone of the next project. For those who fail, one single wrong turn can mean disaster.

That was something that brothers Bo and Ulf Andersson learned firsthand in the summer of 2008. They were two guys from Huddinge, outside of Stockholm, whose names were on the lips of everyone in the gaming industry. In just a couple of years, they had taken the game studio Grin from being a small newcomer to one of Sweden’s most talked about. The company worked on several large games, among them a hyped-up new interpretation of the eighties classic
Bionic Commando
(commissioned by Japanese Capcom), and a game based on the movie
Wanted
(to be published by French game company Ubisoft). Grin’s breakthrough came in 2006, with the war game
Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter
. The game was hailed by the critics, became a retail success, and was celebrated with expensive champagne at the corporate office. Some of the gaming world’s absolute top people had their eyes on Grin and flew to Stockholm to listen to the Andersson brothers’ visions of the future.

A few years later, there were rumors in the business that Square Enix itself, one of Japan’s most esteemed video game publishers, had hired Grin for a high-stakes prestige project. The Andersson brothers had been given the task of developing the next installment of the iconic gaming series
Final Fantasy
. It was a huge deal. Japanese publishers seldom use Western game studios for their most important titles. Being asked to work on the next sequel of Japan’s most famous video game series was, for a relatively unproven Swedish developer like Grin, comparable to two newly graduated architects from Sweden being asked to redesign the Sydney Opera House. Grin expanded swiftly and hired new people. By the end of 2008, the company had nearly three hundred employees and offices in far-off places like Barcelona and Jakarta.

Then things took a turn for the worse. Neither
Bionic Commando
nor
Wanted
received the warm welcome that Grin had expected, right when the financial crisis made game-players think twice before opening their wallets. Sales were so-so. Not a disaster, but not good enough for Grin to count on making back the enormous amounts of money they had invested. Their Japanese employers began to worry.

Just before summer 2009, they received the fateful news; Square Enix was withdrawing the
Final Fantasy
contract from Grin, mumbling something about deficient quality, and canceled all payments. The Andersson brothers could only look on as their life’s work began to fall apart. The company they had devoted their lives to building was impossible to save. In the summer of 2009, Grin filed for bankruptcy and 250 people lost their jobs.

2009 was a sobering year for the Swedish gaming industry. Several years of astronomical growth were followed by a major decline. Total sales in the industry fell by 17 percent. Since then, the figures have improved, but the fantastic growth of the first years of the twenty-first century has completely vanished.

With constantly ballooning budgets and increasing competition for players’ cash, it’s easy to see, in retrospect, the signs that the gaming industry was painting itself into a corner. There’s nothing wrong with the games—interest in computer games is greater than ever, and Swedish-designed and developed games are internationally acclaimed. However, there is evidence that the traditional publishing model, favoring large, lavish game productions at the expense of smaller, bolder ideas and innovation, had perhaps grown about as large and profitable as it was going to get.

This is where Midasplayer, into whose offices Markus first stepped in the fall of 2004, comes into play. Their business concept contradicts many of the industry’s established truths. The company develops only the kind of small, simple, web-based games that Markus was hired to design more of, games played on computers, cell phones, or on a tablet, either through an app or on the website King.com. Midasplayer offers innumerable versions of popular board games and card games, along with variations of well-known arcade games and puzzles. Most of them can be played free of charge—provided the player agrees to watch a few ads. Others cost a few dollars a month to play. In many of the games, you can even bet on yourself and win a few bucks if you’re good.