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

by Daniel Goldberg

  A few days had passed since Markus had returned from his visit to Valve. The two friends were ready to start their company, but there were some knots that first needed to be untangled. Markus was already netting tens of thousands of dollars daily in Minecraft sales. Letting Jakob in as a partner in the company would mean he’d be giving away half of his creation—hundreds of thousands of dollars—with no guarantees. Markus wasn’t interested in starting a company by himself, but he also didn’t want to risk destroying his friendship with Jakob over money, nor did he want to be Jakob’s boss. They were friends, and friends don’t hire each other, they reasoned.

  That’s why they’d brought a business plan to the dinner table. Today, no one remembers its exact details, just that the structure of the company the two programmers described to Carl was extremely complicated. Markus and Jakob would own the company together, but not really, and somewhere, a huge loan would compensate for the financial inequality of the relationship.

  Carl chewed his fish and listened. For him, the evening was also something of a job interview. Shortly before, after leaving Jalbum to work full-time with Minecraft, Markus had carefully asked if Carl knew of anyone who would be a good CEO for the company he wanted to start. Carl Manneh had answered yes and immediately nominated himself. Now he was here, listening to two excited programmers describe a crazy idea for a company. Not that the business would have any problems staying afloat; he knew very well that Minecraft was already pulling in enormous sums of money. But the structure Markus and Jakob were suggesting was among the most bizarre he had ever heard of.

  Carl gives a discreet impression the first time you meet him. He doesn’t speak more than necessary and doesn’t brag nearly as much as he could. His facial expressions seldom reveal what is really going on in his mind; you could call it a poker face, or just prudence. Regardless, it’s a characteristic useful in negotiations, both with giant international companies and with gifted programmers who have strange ideas about how to run a company. When Markus and Jakob finished, Carl pushed his plate aside and volunteered, as humbly as possible, his alternative. The duo—or the three of them if he were trusted—would form a new company they owned together. Markus would keep the immaterial rights to Minecraft in his own company, writing a license that gave the new company exclusive rights to develop and sell the game. No one needed to give away his life’s work and no one became the other’s boss. The future CEO excused himself and went off to the men’s room. The two programmers sat quietly at the table for a little while. Then Jakob turned to Markus.

  “You know, I feel about seven years old right now.”

  “Yeah, I know what you mean.”

  It was perhaps at that moment the business structure of Minecraft was nailed down. Markus and Jakob already had an idea of what kind of company they wanted to start. At Mojang, everything would revolve around really great games, innovative games. They would brainstorm ideas and together develop the games they had always dreamed of. Markus wanted to work on Minecraft for another six months, and after that, the money would finance new projects—starting with Scrolls. With the millions from Minecraft safe in the bank, there was no reason to compromise that vision. But they needed someone to keep finances in order, to see to the financial development and all the other stuff that belongs to the world of business. Markus and Jakob had only a vague idea of how to run a company, even less of the experience necessary to steer the enormous endeavor that they’d decided to undertake. After dinner at Ljunggrens, the two programmers agreed—Carl was the right man for the job. Markus and Jakob offered him a position, a place on the board, and a partnership in the new company. Carl accepted. On September 17, 2010, Mojang AB was registered, with Markus Persson and Jakob Porser as main owners and Carl Manneh as CEO. They took the name from mojäng, the Swedish word for “thingamabob” or “whatchamacallit,” dropping the umlaut from over the letter a.

  With the licensing model Carl suggested, most of the money from Minecraft went to Markus. The sliver remaining for Mojang would still be more than enough to hire several programmers, build upon Minecraft, and to begin looking toward the future of the company.

  First and foremost, they needed an office. They chose an apartment just a couple of blocks away from Ljunggrens, a few stories up in a building on Åsögatan—a more carefully considered location than it might seem at first glance. The blocks around Medborgarplatsen on Södermalm are, to game developers, historic ground. A short stroll through the area surrounding Mojang’s office will take you by several famous game studios, where games worth millions of dollars are developed each year.

  Begin at the door of Mojang, on Åsögatan, and turn west. On Götgatan, you’ll find Paradox Interactive’s office. Paradox is one of the world’s most famous strategy-game studios and publishes titles such as Europa Universalis and Hearts of Iron. Avalanche has its studio on the other side of the same building. Around the corner, more than seventy employees work for Electronic Arts–owned Easy Studios, which develops the online game Battlefield Heroes. Stop for a second and turn southward. On the horizon, less than a mile away, just over the Skanstull Bridge, you can just see the sports arena Globen. Next to the giant sphere is the site of the infamous police raid on the file-sharing site Pirate Bay in 2006. The game studio Fatshark is also located there, perhaps best known for the role-playing game Krater, which takes place in a postapocalyptic Karlstad (a city in Swedish Värmland). Continue north on Götgatan, past the skateboard ramps at Medborgarplatsen. At Slussen, you can peek up toward the Glass House by the dock, where DICE is enthroned in its headquarters.

  Markus Persson, Jakob Porser, and Daniel Kaplan at work in the Mojang office. Photo by Elin Zetterstrand.

  This is where most Stockholmers get on the subway. A visitor interested in the Internet can instead walk up Katarinavägen to Renstiernas gata were, in an old bunker under Mariaberget, there is a data center belonging to the Internet company Bahnhof, the former home of the world-famous whistleblower site Wikileaks. If you then turn north, walk through Gamla stan and past Kungsträdgården, you’ll arrive at Birger Jarlsgatan and the headquarters of the music company Spotify.

  Stockholm is a small city, but per capita, few cities in the world have meant more for the development of IT. If you ask anyone you meet in Stockholm what he or she does for a living, the answer probably has something to do with computers. The fact is that systems developers make up the largest single occupational category in the city; there are more professionally active programmers in Stockholm than there are nurses’ aides, salespeople, or economists.

  For the past three years the international business school INSEAD has ranked Sweden as the world’s second most innovative country—after Switzerland, but ahead of Hong Kong, Singapore, and the United States. Today, Sweden is also one of the world’s most broadband-dense countries, with nearly 100 percent coverage, calculated by population. Besides great broadband connections, large investments have made it possible for Swedish IT companies to grow. It’s easy to get stuck harping on the many bankruptcies of the early twenty-first century, but many venture capitalists have also made a lot of money on fast-growing Swedish technology firms. For example, those who invested in Spotify in 2008 watched as the value tripled in only two years. Companies such as Skype, Tradera, and MySQL have also pulled in big money for their investors. In these contexts Scandinavia is significantly overrepresented, being home to 22 percent of Europe’s largest software companies despite accounting for only a few percent of Europe’s population. In the last few years, one tenth of all sales (“exits” in investor-speak), for a total of more than a billion dollars, have been made in the Scandinavian countries.

  The question is, why has it turned out that way? Some people point to a straightforward and uncomplicated business culture. Paradoxically, others credit it to Sweden’s small population. Just over 9 million residents are just not enough to sustain a company selling only to the domestic market. Another country with similar challenges is Israel, which also has a
small population and has made large technological advances. Both Israeli and Swedish technology companies are forced from the beginning to think globally and aim for the world market. That same logic applies to the game industry. Apart from a few successes with games built around well-known children’s-book characters, such as Mulle Meck (Gary Gadget) and Pettson and Findus, Swedish game developers have always worked with an international audience in mind. That’s why they could make early contacts with international publishers and learn the economic structure of the global game industry.

  However, just as important for the growth of the Swedish gaming industry has been the fact that Sweden consumes the pop-culture diet of the English-speaking world. That’s what Per Strömbäck, spokesperson for the Swedish game industry’s interest group Dataspelsbranschen says.

  “We discovered Dungeons and Dragons at the same time as the Americans did. We’ve read the same comics and listened to the same music,” he explains.

  That, combined with a good command of English from an early age, has given Swedish developers an advantage in the art of creating games with the right cultural content to reach an international audience.

  “It’s given us an enormous edge in comparison to many other countries in Europe. They have the technical knowledge, but their cultural frames of reference have been totally different,” says Per Strömbäck.

  From the perspective of the gaming industry, the IT bubble—and especially its collapse early in the first decade of the twenty-first century—was of great significance. Large numbers of newly started IT companies, which only a couple of years earlier had been hyped to the heavens, crashed spectacularly. The immediate result was that tens of thousands of experienced programmers were thrown out of work. Given the well-developed digital infrastructure in Sweden, this created very fertile breeding ground for technology entrepreneurs, as well as a nearly bottomless labor pool for game-development companies to dip into.

  Mojang’s office on Södermalm may have been right smack dab in the middle of the city’s game cluster, but from the street there were no visible signs that the building now harbored one of the world’s most talked-about game studios. To enter, visitors had to press a button on the intercom marked with a small, discreet sign that read “Mojang.” Most of the time it didn’t work. The intercom was hooked up wrong and was connected to some other phone somewhere in the building (no one ever succeeded in figuring out exactly which one). If you didn’t have Markus’s, Carl’s, or Jakob’s telephone number, you had to press another button instead and ask one of the neighbors to open the front door.

  With time, the shabby apartment became a little cozier. One of the walls was covered in artificial grass and decorated with a large Mojang logo lit from behind. The entire back wall was decked out with a painting of mine shafts and small figures inspired by Minecraft’s blocky graphics. The office soon felt typical of a young company in a creative business, equal parts playground and workplace. Anyone who’d worked for a quickly-growing dot-com startup during the late nineties would have felt at home.

  It took Carl a few months to extract himself from his job at Jalbum, which he’d had for two years. But it’s not surprising that he accepted Markus and Jakob’s offer. In 2010, Jalbum posted a loss of over $570,000, and this with a turnover of just over $425,000. The company had costs that more than doubled their revenues, and that was a good year. It’s not unusual for new companies to show initial losses, but there’s a limit, after which investors lose their patience and want their money back. It would be safe to say that Jalbum was approaching that limit when Carl decided to cut his losses and leave.

  Nothing could be more different from Jalbum than Mojang. There, Carl saw the opportunity to lead a company that was starting out with an initial success. Even as Mojang was being founded, there was plenty of buzz about Minecraft. At Jalbum, Carl regularly had to badger his way into meetings with investors and then, once there, to more or less beg them to buy shares of the company so he could keep paying his workers’ wages. Now it was the opposite. Now investors called him asking to be allowed to put cash into Mojang, but Carl didn’t need them.

  Paying wages was not the problem; instead, the challenge lay in finding the right people to pay. And it needed to happen fast. They needed someone to take care of the server that players logged into so that Markus could devote his energy to the game. The website where people bought the game was due for an overhaul, and someone needed to get started on a version of Minecraft for smartphones. Carl, Jakob, and Markus made recruitment a high priority, and in less than a year, Mojang went from being a small startup to being a miniature gaming empire. Of the handful of new hires, everyone, except Carl Manneh and Daniel Kaplan who were brought on as business developers, was either a programmer or a graphic designer.

  One of the first to be hired was Jens Bergensten, a tall, skinny programmer with long red hair in a ponytail. Markus had met him the year before at No More Sweden.

  “Markus was already somewhat of a local hero by then. Minecraft had been around for a couple of months, and everyone knew it was his game,” says Jens.

  When the two met for the first time at No More Sweden, Jens had just begun playing Minecraft. He’d brought a friend, Pontus Hammarberg, and a severe case of the flu.

  “Pontus had just returned from the United States and had probably brought the swine flu back. We sat up around-the-clock playing Minecraft. When I slept, I dreamt fever dreams about how my buildings fell apart. They were large pyramids crashing down, and I was forced to fix them,” he says.

  Like Markus, Jens’s interest in programming games has followed him since childhood. When he was twelve, he got fed up with the fact that only two people could play at a time in the 1980s game Nibbles, a variant of the classic cell-phone game Snake. By fooling around with the code, he found exactly which parts needed to be copied in order to let three people play the game simultaneously. Along with that find, Jens also discovered a fascination for programming. He understood that all those rows of incomprehensible combinations of symbols made up the game itself. Games were fun, he thought, so obviously code was also going to be fun. After finishing school, he worked as an IT consultant for a while, then later became one of several programmers to work on the Swedish web game Planeto. He wrote his own games in his free time, participated in contests, and socialized with other programmers.

  “I’m not the world’s best programmer. I just happen to work very well with Markus. We have the same design philosophy and the same sources of inspiration,” says Jens.

  Officially, Mojang hired Jens to program the server parts of Scrolls. But Scrolls was mostly just an idea in Jakob’s head when Jens started working on it, so he asked if he could sit down and check out the code behind Minecraft instead. The next version of the game was to be released before Christmas. To finish it on time, Markus accepted all the help he could get, and better yet from someone who, like himself, had dreamed of making a living developing games since he was a kid.

  Once installed at Mojang, Jens tried to get a handle on the code that Markus had written, which might sound like a cakewalk for someone who has never done programming. But writing code is creating art. Give the same problem to two programmers and they’ll give you two completely different solutions. And few will come up with constructions as odd as Markus’s. He’s a lone inventor—a solo programmer, through and through. Wrapping one’s head around his creation entails, in a way, understanding how his brain works. And it’s a brain that has earned him membership in Mensa.

  As the end of 2010 was approaching, Markus and the others took some time off for Christmas. Jens, who doesn’t like Christmas, went to work as usual. The office was empty, most of the nearby lunch restaurants were closed for the holidays, and the heating system in the turn-of-the-previous-century building was broken. It was below freezing outside and pretty cold inside the office too. Wearing his jacket and scarf, Jens sat there alone and continued working on Minecraft, having been given no instructions except to try
“to build a few features,” as Markus had told him in passing before taking off for the holidays.

  He spent a lot of time on wool. On dyeing it, especially. Jens liked the square-shaped sheep that scampered around in the Minecraft world, but thought that their color was boring. If players could only get some more colors, then they would have yet another way to modify their environment, he figured. He used his frozen fingers to type out different ways of extracting dyes from minerals. He pondered the color black for a long time and came to the conclusion that squids would be the natural source from which it could be extracted in the Minecraft world. And so he created an appropriately blocky squid figure and programmed it into the game. A few days after the New Year, it was time to demonstrate his creations.

  Carl stood nervously, shifting his weight from side to side as Jens clicked the new animals onto the screen. Markus stood next to him. Carl knew that there was a very real possibility that the creator of the game they all made a living on would hit the brakes and reject all of it. A real possibility of instigating a conflict that could put a big stick in the spokes of the company wheels. An exaggeration? Not at all. No one had ever touched Markus’s life work before. If you take game development as seriously as he does, the situation could be compared to Michelangelo’s apprentice having worked overtime one weekend painting his own people on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Shit, meet fan, Carl thought.

  However, when Jens demonstrated his new features on screen, Markus’s lips parted in a smile. Here was someone who got it. Now and then, he asked a question, and Jens patiently answered. After that session, it was obvious that Jens would receive an entirely overhauled job description. Now there were two people developing and designing Minecraft.