© Mojang.
Portrait Better than a collection of blocky graphics was not with ‘Minecraft’: creator Markus ‘Notch’ Person was too lazy to polish his game and wanted the first version in a week time have done. But sucess nevertheless quickly followed, and today he sold the company he built around his creation, but for 2.5 billion dollars (1.9 billion euros) to Microsoft. A portrait of a 35 year old computer nerd who literally became dormant multimillionaire.
“I call myself a programmer, not even a game designer,” he said two years ago during a presentation at the ‘Game Developers Conference’ in San Francisco. “As the company began to myself, who initially worked on herself, I became the public face of it. Almost by accident.” He is modest, the 35-year-old Markus ‘Notch’ Persson. Despite the millions who also almost by accident, he earned with his video game ‘Minecraft’. Five years after the creation of the game he led until today, along with two co-owners, the Stockholm-based game company Mojang, that he only pulled up around his game, there was after all something happen to the millions of euros appeared to end up in the tens of thousands, and then hundreds of thousands, and later millions of players who have game downloading. suddenly in his bank account The company had today when it officially became the property of Microsoft, 35 employees, and Persson and his two partners for $ 2.5 billion, 1.9 billion are each several hundred million euros richer. How hard it has been working for them? Basically just a week.
In 2009, the then fledgling thirties worked after his day job as a programmer at the Swedish Internet company jAlbum, which was working on an online photo service Indeed, in a week are ‘Minecraft’ off. The blocky graphics that are the trademark of the game would be mainly the result of Perssons impatience to get ready. “I just wanted a game that would bring so I could start a new game currency fast enough,” said Persson recently in the American magazine Rolling Stone. But this new game was not as fast with players immediately started to give an early version of the game, and the number of downloads quickly ran into the tens of thousands of money. Today there are 100 million gamers ‘Minecraft’ downloading, the game is a phenomenon, and Persson was already a multimillionaire before Mojang became part of Microsoft.
© Mojang. What then is so special about ‘Minecraft’? Freedom. ‘Minecraft’ play is like playing with virtual lego: players running around in a world that resembles a block version of the Swedish tundra, and may the blocks in which it is made use to make their own creations note: some build mountains, others tunnels, still others a stone version of the USS Enterprise, the spaceship from “Star Trek.” TV series There are small risks in your path (you can fall off a cliff, drown or be attacked by zombies), but the core of the game is that there is no real goals, no main character, no rules, and no opponent. Actually, the opposite of what a “real” video game should be. But that just proves that ‘Minecraft’ might be a milestone in video game history. “The younger generation of gamers want games where the developers do not tell them what to do,” says Dylan Cuthbert, creator of the well-known especially among younger players’ Pixeljunk’ games. “The game has to mold itself to their needs: that’s what players want since ‘Minecraft’ came on the market.”
Persson, known among players as ‘Notch’ because that is the name he uses when he plays online games, has after ‘Minecraft’ really little more scalloped. The further development of the game – there are meanwhile versions available for each game platform that exists, from the iPhone to the PlayStation 4 – he gave in 2011 off your hands. Since then he spends the days in his luxury penthouse in Stockholm and in his Mojang office by to assist a programmer of the new games which the company unsuccessfully tried to emulate a little his first success, and he spends the rest of the time just to play games. The millions of ticks anyway, so why not do real work? With the money he gives luxurious parties, often as a benefit for a charity that he supports, with performances by famous topdj like Deadmau5. “People say I should invest,” he says in ‘Rolling Stone’. “So I still owe money on a pile? If I give out at least something is happening.”
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