Minecraft: The Unlikely Tale of Markus Notch Persson and the Game that Changed Everything

by Daniel Goldberg

  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.

  Today, Midasplayer is one of Sweden’s largest gaming companies. In 2012, it had more than a hundred employees, tens of millions of players every day, and nearly $14 million in sales. The company is in many ways the antithesis of how a traditional game studio like DICE operates. It has no publishers or stores acting as middlemen—games are bought online and the players’ money goes right into the pockets of the game developers. Indicative of the potential that investors see in the model, the gaming giant Zynga, specializing in Facebook games and perhaps Midasplayer’s biggest competitor, had an estimated value of nearly $9 billion when it went public in December 2011. Most experts with an eye on the gaming industry feel that it’s the small, simple productions like the ones created by Zynga and Midasplayer that will reap the future profits. And it was in this corner of the industry that Markus began his career as a professional game developer.

  Chapter 5

  “They Just Don’t Get It.”

  Markus’s first few months at Midasplayer were good. Fantastic, even. Every morning, he got himself out of bed and out the door, to the commuter train and into Midasplayer’s office in central Stockholm. It was a dream job for a young game developer. Hundreds of thousands of people played the games he and his colleagues put out on the web. Besides, he was well paid.

  Markus was one of the first game developers to be hired at Midasplayer. Soon there were a few others, until around twenty people shared the office. Everyone worked according to the same, well-practiced model: each individual game was developed by a group of two to eight people and never took more than four months to finish. It was a fast and, more important, very cheap way to develop games. Markus liked working fast and, as a developer, having some degree of control during the whole process.

  But soon he realized that it wasn’t a love of quality games that determined which projects he and the other programmers were assigned. The management at Midasplayer had an ice-cold mathematical approach to their products. Games that immediately earned a lot of money or showed a high virality (Midasplayer-speak for spreading quickly via recommendations among friends and acquaintances) were praised as hits. The company quickly put the developers to work on sequels, enhanced with better graphics and new features, to entice the player to spend even more money and time.

  At the same time, innovative projects, usually the games Markus liked, were quickly brushed aside as uninteresting. Midasplayer’s successes came from an extreme reach—several million players who each paid a small sum—and a narrow concept of what they considered appropriate to produce. All the games were built on a few, well-established concepts. Card games and board games were popular, as well as clones of arcade classics like Puzzle Bobble (a “bubble shooter” or “bubble spinner,” as they were called). Many titles were almost identical to one another, differing only in graphic themes, sound effects, and scoring systems. Trying new things was just not a part of Midasplayer’s business plan.

  For Markus, that insight was depressing. Sometimes it felt more like he worked in a casino, responsible only for trimming the poker tables and roulette games, than in the world of game creation that he’d dreamt about.

  But there were advantages to having a stable job. Just before he started at Midasplayer, Markus was finally able to break his promise (or threat?) to live at home with his mom for the rest of his life. She wasn’t sure why he’d changed his mind, but one day Markus came home and told her that he’d found an apartment in Sollentuna, north of Stockholm, that he wanted to buy. The place wasn’t extraordinary, but at least it was his. When the paperwork was complete, Markus took his computer, clothes, and the rest of his stuff, gave Mom a hug and vanished.

  It’s common for parents to visit their children’s first own home and be appalled. Ritva describes Markus’s apartment in Sollentuna as a disaster zone: The bed unmade, the floor covered with dirty clothes and empty soda bottles. And everywhere, games. There were floppy disks, CDs, and game boxes in a glorious mess. The only thing that wasn’t covered with a thick layer of dust was Markus’s computer. When Ritva came to visit, she couldn’t resist going over the place with a vacuum cleaner and a wet rag, scrubbing away the worst of the grime.

  “It’s like he doesn’t see it. For him, it’s completely irrelevant if it’s a mess,” says a person close to Markus, who often visited him in Sollentuna.

  While Markus had moved out of the house, gotten a steady job, and was making money, his sister was sinking deeper into drugs. There were times when Anna was homeless and living on the street. The siblings kept in touch, and Anna describes her brother as the only fixed point in her life at that time. But they were seeing less of each other, and when they did meet, it was usually about money. Markus hated to see Anna losing control, but he didn’t know what to do to help her. Giving her money was meaningless, he knew that, but when she asked for it, he seldom had the heart to say no. Anna remembers one of the many instances when she called on her brother at home. M
arkus took a five-hundred-kronor bill ($70) from his wallet and held it out to his sister.

  “Take this now and you’ll never get anything else from me,” he said.

  Anna swallowed her pride, took the money, and disappeared.

  Perhaps his messy family life was one reason why Markus clung to his job. In spite of everything, it was still the best job he’d ever had and besides, he really liked the other programmers. Markus always describes himself as quiet and shy, but if you ask his colleagues, a different image emerges. When with his closest coworkers, Markus was happy and open. He was the one who made sure they went for beers after work or got together for a couple of rounds of Counter-Strike or Team Fortress 2 during their lunch break. People at work shared the same interests, the same deeply rooted fascination with computer games and programming, and were just as nerdy as he was.

  Markus found a better outlet for his ambitions outside of work. He and Rolf Jansson had already realized their plan to develop a game together. It was titled Wurm Online, and it was an extremely ambitious project for two amateur developers. An online role-playing game, Wurm Online was a spacious and open world, where a large number of players took part simultaneously. The game differed from others of the same genre (the immensely popular World of Warcraft, for example) mainly in its openness. The world born of Markus and Rolf’s vision was one where the players were free to change anything they wanted—to build houses, dig mineshafts, earn money, or wage war on one another, for example.

  Markus Persson and Elin Zetterstrand playing video games at the Mojang office in Stockholm. Photo courtesy of Elin Zetterstrand. Photo by Joshua Corsen (@averad).

  When Markus began working for Midasplayer, Wurm Online had already been live for a couple of months. The two friends spent almost all their free time on the game, thinking, planning, and programming together until the early morning hours. They didn’t make any money from it, at least not yet, but for Markus and Rolf it was enough just to see how increasing numbers of players found their way to their fantasy world and chose to stay inside it. For Markus, Wurm Online was a creative refuge. There, he could test his own ideas and develop the game as he wished, without asking his managers at Midasplayer for permission.

  With time, Markus became a knowledgeable and experienced game programmer, particularly with the Java programming language. With experience came the task of teaching newcomers at the firm. Management often had to contend with the fact that those who showed up for the job interviews didn’t always know a lot about game development. Most often, they figured it would work out anyway and counted on the more experienced developers to take the new talent under their wings.

  Among the new talent was Jakob Porser, who had recently become a father and had been a consultant before his job vanished in the dot-com crash a couple of years earlier. After that he took a course in creative programming at the college in Gävle—the same course that DICE’s CEO, Karl Magnus Troedsson, had completed barely ten years earlier. Jakob then moved to Stockholm to find work, and Midasplayer hired him. To learn more, he was assigned to sit next to Markus. With his dark mop of hair, his rectangular glasses, and his quick speech, Jakob seemed very different from Markus. Besides, he had a baby to support, which meant that he felt differently about his new job. Earning a paycheck was his highest priority.

  But like Markus, Jakob loved computer games, and the two programmers immediately hit it off. They had the same interests and sense of humor and could end up sitting for hours at work, absorbed in conversations about obscure computer games. As with Rolf Jansson a couple of years earlier, Markus and Jakob had a shared enthusiasm for Magic: The Gathering, and when they weren’t playing the game themselves, they were discussing ways to improve it.

  Markus told Jakob about his experiences with Wurm Online. Jakob listened with interest and told Markus about the game he dreamed of developing. It would be a kind of digital version of Magic: The Gathering, where the cards were stored in the computer and the players could meet in matches over the Internet; a strategy game in a fantasy world, but also inspired by the card collecting and trading that characterized Magic. Markus loved it. After work they’d go to a pizza shop and remain there until late into the evenings, fleshing out Jakob’s roughly outlined ideas, discussing game mechanics, and polishing their plans for the future.

  Markus also met his future wife at Midasplayer. One day at work, he passed by a conference room on his way to his office and saw through the glass wall a short woman sitting with her back toward him. One of the managers was on the other side of the desk. It was obviously a job interview. The girl being interviewed was Elin, and she was hired a few weeks later as an online community coordinator. Her job was to manage the company’s contact with users of Midasplayer’s casino games, making sure that everything worked and helping players solve any issues.

  Elin’s first day at Midasplayer was June 1, which also happened to be Markus’s birthday. That evening, all the programmers went out to celebrate, and Elin came along. Markus had already decided he wanted to get to know her and now, with a couple of beers under his belt, he mustered the courage and introduced himself. The exchange must have looked comical—Elin is as short and thin as Markus is tall and large—but the two remained in each other’s company the whole evening. They talked about computer games, and even though Elin was no programmer, she was just as devoted to games as Markus. They even had the same tastes.

  Computer games brought Markus and Elin closer during their initial friendship. Every day at lunch they connected their computers and tried to kill each other in Team Fortress 2 (Markus won most of the games then, says Elin, but she makes it very clear that today she gets at least as many points as he does.) They soon began spending more time together; they went out after work, then out to dinner, then to the amusement park Gröna Lund. His colleagues soon realized that Markus and the girl from the casino department were a thing.

  Elin also became the person Markus went to when he needed to vent his irritation over the managers at Midasplayer. It was increasingly obvious that he wasn’t happy at work. He liked being responsible for every aspect of a game project, from idea to implementation, and it drove him crazy having click statistics and profit as the only goals to strive for.

  “They just don’t get it,” he would say to Elin after work. “They’re idiots.”

  When Markus began working at Midasplayer, company policy forbade employees from making money on independently developed games. That wasn’t particularly odd; few employers like to have their employees moonlighting with what can be seen as a competitive enterprise. However, during Midasplayer’s first year, no one took the rule seriously. Besides Wurm Online, which Markus had worked on before he was even hired at the company, he kept developing his own little games in his free time, mostly as a way to explore the ideas he wasn’t allowed to pursue at work.

  Management didn’t really think that Markus’s amateur coding was a problem. It didn’t disturb his workday at the company, and there was nothing to complain about in Markus’s performance. They just looked the other way. However, the more Midasplayer grew, the more strictly the rules were enforced, and Markus felt it firsthand one day in the fall of 2008. He had just finished his latest hobby project, a game called Blast Passage. It was a kind of combination of two classic arcade games, Bomberman and Gauntlet, and for those who know their gaming history, the result was both cleverly allusive and appealing. Blast Passage was simple, fun, and full of winks to the old eighties titles that inspired it. Not without certain pride, Markus sent out an e-mail to the other employees at Midasplayer with a link, encouraging them to try it out. The reaction was not what Markus expected.

  Versions of what actually happened differ, depending on whom you ask. Markus describes how, almost immediately after sending the e-mail, he was called into a conference room. There, he was severely reprimanded by Lars Markgren, director of the company and the person who had founded Midasplayer a couple of years earlier. Lars Markgren reminded him of the rul
es in his contract, emphasizing that all games Markus developed belonged to Midasplayer and that this clause applied to Blast Passage. Markus received a warning and the orders to shape up.

  Lars Markgren has another recollection of what happened. What Markus calls a reprimand, Lars describes as a discussion. Markus had permission to work with Wurm Online in his free time, says Lars Markgren, but Blast Passage was too similar to the games Midasplayer developed. Lars suggested that Markus adapt the game to Midasplayer customers and release it to the public. A version of Blast Passage was uploaded onto King.com shortly thereafter. It never became a huge success; the typical player at King.com isn’t particularly well versed in gaming history and prefers a few moments of recreation to clever references. Midaplayer customers just weren’t interested in Blast Passage.

  The conflict had a huge impact on Markus. His freedom to work on his own projects had been perhaps the main reason why he hadn’t left Midasplayer earlier.

  “Why should I stay here?” Markus asked himself.

  In moments like that, he liked to think back to the discussions he’d had with Jakob. The two of them had become more and more convinced that they wanted to start their own game studio in due time. Markus now had experience developing a game of his own; his years with Wurm Online had showed him it could be done if you applied yourself enough. Also, Jakob’s idea (the basis of the game that would later become Scrolls) felt too promising to just set aside, and they had several other ideas they wanted to sink their teeth into. However, with the new, stricter Midasplayer rules, the possibility felt remote.