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Minecraft

Block by block

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Markus Persson started Minecraft in May 2009 after seeing Infiniminer, sold it while it was still unfinished, and released version 1.0 in November 2011. Microsoft bought his company, Mojang, for $2.5 billion in 2014; by April 2025 the game had sold 350 million copies.

Minecraft began as one programmer’s copy of someone else’s idea and became the best-selling single video game on record. Markus Persson, a Swedish developer working in his spare time, saw a small multiplayer block-mining game called Infiniminer in the spring of 2009, decided it was “the game I wanted to do”, and had a playable version of his own online within weeks. He charged for it from the start, kept changing it in public for two and a half years, and by the time he called it finished in November 2011 it had sold millions of copies. Three years later Microsoft paid $2.5 billion for his company.

Fast facts

  • Creator: Markus Persson, then Mojang.
  • First public version: May 2009.
  • Version 1.0: 18 November 2011, announced by Persson at the first MineCon, in Las Vegas.
  • Microsoft: bought Mojang for $2.5 billion, announced 15 September 2014 and completed 6 November 2014.
  • Sales: 300 million by October 2023 (Mojang); 350 million by April 2025 (Mojang, via Guinness World Records).

From RubyDung to Infiniminer

Persson told the story himself on his blog in October 2009. Before Minecraft he had been writing “RubyDung”, which “was supposed to be a base building game inspired by Dwarf Fortress, but with a heavy focus on accessibility”. As its engine grew he began “thinking about adding a first person view for following your minions around, kinda like in Dungeon Keeper”. Then, he wrote, “I found Infiniminer. My god, I realized that that was the game I wanted to do.” Zachary Barth’s Infiniminer, released that April, had players dig and build in a world of blocks. Persson “played it in multiplayer for a while and had a blast, but found it flawed”, and “thought a fantasy game in that style would work really really well”. He wrote a first-person block engine, reusing some of RubyDung’s art and code, and that became Minecraft.

Edge’s 2012 profile of the studio gives the background. Persson had worked at Midasplayer, the company behind the King.com games portal, and left because, in his colleague Jakob Porser’s words, “They didn’t like us making games in our spare time”. He was working at a photo-sharing company run by Carl Manneh when he started the game. The first version went out in May 2009, and Persson sold it while it was still being written: players paid for an unfinished game and got every update as it came.

Two years in public

The early buyers shaped the game. Persson told Edge that Minecraft had been “very much defect-driven development, where I play the game and think about what feels like it’s missing, and what could be added”. Some features came from the players, “such as when it came to adding ladders or booster tracks”. The lack of a tutorial began as a convenience, “because the game was in alpha, and I could just tell people directly what they needed to know”, and became a habit: “Now we have several huge wikis and forums dedicated to the game”. The game’s best-known monster was a bug. “I made all models for the game pragmatically in code, and got the length and height variables switched when I tried to make a pig. So I made it explode.” That was the Creeper.

By the end of 2011, Edge reported, the game had sold over four million copies during its “two-year beta”. Persson and Jens Bergensten drew up a list of features to finish, and on 18 November 2011 Persson announced version 1.0 on stage at MineCon, a convention Mojang held for its players in Las Vegas. “With millions of sold copies,” he said, “it didn’t really make much sense to call the game ‘pre-release’ any more.” Bergensten then took over as the game’s lead developer.

What it was like to play

Edge reviewed version 1.0 in January 2012 and gave it nine out of ten. Each game begins in “a procedurally generated landscape of mountains and dales, deserts and strongholds, that nobody else will ever have seen before”, and the player arrives “as a block-headed Robinson Crusoe, lost, lonely”, with nothing. One click takes a block from the world into the inventory and another puts it back. Crafting is visual: “Two sticks beneath three planks will give you a wooden pickaxe, so two sticks beneath three cobblestones should provide you with a hardier model.” Night brings zombies and Endermen, “forcing you to work during the day and then fortify yourself after dark”, and a careless axe can bury you in lava. Creative mode switches the danger off, lets the player fly and gives unlimited materials, which the reviewer found “intoxicating for a few sweet hours” but less rewarding than surviving.

The review’s verdict was that the game’s strength lay in what Persson left out: “the core of Minecraft is still space: space to build, space to explore, space to creatively, even accidentally, do yourself in.” It quoted the poem that closes version 1.0, “I will not tell the player how to live”, and called Minecraft “the most important PC game of the past five years”. The randomly built worlds are an example of procedural generation, and the recipe grid of crafting systems.

Mojang

Persson’s company had begun as Mojang Specifications, alongside the game’s first release, but he signed the papers establishing it only in mid-October 2010. When Edge visited in early 2012 Minecraft had “18 million registered accounts”, and on the day of the visit it sold 9,510 copies at £16.95 each, £161,195 in a single day. Manneh was chief executive, Porser was leading a second game, Scrolls, and staff were preparing an Xbox 360 version with Microsoft and adding survival to the mobile Pocket Edition. Persson himself had stepped back from the game to take a break.

The Xbox 360 Edition, converted by 4J Studios of Dundee, went on sale on Xbox Live Arcade in May 2012 and, Microsoft said, sold “more than 1,000,000 units globally” in its first week; the Dundee games scene entry has more on the studio. Minecraft had reached classrooms too. In October 2012 Edge reported that MinecraftEdu, a version for teachers made by Santeri Koivisto and Joel Levin with Mojang’s support, was in “over 400 schools”.

Microsoft

On 15 September 2014 Microsoft announced that it would buy Mojang for $2.5 billion. Its announcement counted “more than 100 million downloads, on PC alone” since 2009 and called Minecraft “the most popular online game on Xbox”. Mojang said the founders, Persson among them, would leave; GeekWire reported that he did not want the responsibility of owning a company “of such global significance”. The deal closed on 6 November 2014.

Under Microsoft the game split into two lines that still run side by side. The original, written in Java for computers, is now Minecraft: Java Edition. On 20 September 2017 the “Better Together” update merged the Windows 10, Xbox One and mobile versions into one code base, now called the Bedrock Edition, so that players on different devices could share worlds. Microsoft bought MinecraftEdu in January 2016 and replaced it with Minecraft: Education Edition. Telltale Games made the story game Minecraft: Story Mode.

In March 2019 a test version of the game removed the title-screen messages “Made by Notch!” and “The Work Of Notch!”, though Persson stayed in the credits; Microsoft gave no reason. In April a Microsoft spokesperson told Variety that Persson would not be at the game’s tenth-anniversary event because of his “comments and opinions”, which “do not reflect those of Microsoft or Mojang and are not representative of Minecraft”.

Sales

Minecraft’s sales have been announced in different units at different times, so each figure below is given with its source and date.

  • More than four million copies during the beta, by the end of 2011 (Edge).
  • 18 million registered accounts, early 2012 (Edge).
  • More than 13 million people had bought it by early 2014 (Clint Hocking, writing in Edge).
  • More than 1 million copies of the Xbox 360 Edition in its first week, May 2012 (Microsoft).
  • More than 300 million copies across all versions, announced by Mojang at Minecraft Live on 15 October 2023.
  • 350 million copies, confirmed by Mojang in the Minecraft Annual 2026 and recorded by Guinness World Records in April 2025.

Guinness World Records lists Minecraft as the best-selling video game. The Tetris Company claims more than 520 million units for Tetris, but counted across every version of the game since 1984 rather than as one product.

The game also crossed into cinema. A Minecraft Movie, released by Warner Bros. on 4 April 2025, took more than $960 million worldwide.

Sources

See also

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