In March 2010 Markus Persson’s block-building game had sold 6,400 copies. “I also have a ‘day job’ which I spend two days per week on,” he told Gamasutra, “both for security, and for preventing me from becoming a total shut-in.” Less than two years later Minecraft had sold more than four million copies, and by 2014 Microsoft was paying $2.5 billion for the company he had set up to sell it. Persson’s way of making it changed how games were sold. He charged for Minecraft while it was still unfinished, kept changing it in public, and let the players’ suggestions shape the game. Then he walked away from it.
Fast facts
- Born: 1979, in Stockholm.
- Known as: Notch.
- Before Minecraft: browser games at Midasplayer (King.com); Wurm Online with Rolf Jansson.
- Minecraft: first version May 2009; version 1.0 on 18 November 2011.
- Company: Mojang, sold to Microsoft for $2.5 billion in 2014.
- Since 2024: Bitshift Entertainment.
Learning on a Commodore 128
“My father bought a Commodore 128 when I was seven years old,” Persson told Gamasutra in 2010. A year later he wrote his first game, “an extremely basic text adventure game where you had to enter the correct sentences to move on to the next room.”
As an adult he made small games for a living. At Midasplayer, the company behind the King.com games portal, he wrote browser games; the ones he was proudest of, he said, were “the Zuma and Luxor ports, the pinball game (Pinball King), and a simple little game called Duck Pond Dash”. In his spare time he worked with Rolf Jansson on Wurm Online, an online fantasy world released in 2006. There he made the maps, and “intentionally used a very pseudo-random method for making them where not even I knew exactly what the maps looked like in detail.” He would use the same idea again.
Midasplayer did not like its staff making games in their own time, as his colleague Jakob Porser later told Edge, and Persson left in 2009 for a photo-sharing company run by Carl Manneh.
Minecraft
The story of Minecraft is told in its own entry. Persson began it in May 2009 after playing Zachary Barth’s Infiniminer, a multiplayer game of digging and building with blocks, and seeing “the game I wanted to do”. He wrote a first-person block engine, filled the world with randomly generated landscape, and sold the game from the start. Early buyers paid what Persson called an “early-bird fee” for the unfinished version and got every update.
The approach worked slowly and then very fast. In March 2010 the game was selling about 200 copies a day. By early 2011 Edge reported that it had earned $350,000 a day at its peak. Persson set up Mojang as a company in October 2010 with Porser and Manneh, and on 18 November 2011 he announced version 1.0 on stage at MineCon in Las Vegas. “With millions of sold copies,” he told Edge, “it didn’t really make much sense to call the game ‘pre-release’ any more.”
Edge thought the players deserved some of the credit. In January 2012 its editorial asked who had made Minecraft: “Markus Persson, first working alone and then as part of a small team”, or “the players, who banded together to construct vainglorious follies, swap tips, create wikis and podcasts”? By asking them to pay “long before it was finished”, it argued, Persson had welcomed their feedback and built a community that “would go on to shape the game”. Persson agreed that some features had come from the players, “such as when it came to adding ladders or booster tracks”.
In 2013 Edge blamed Minecraft for changing how unfinished games reached the public. Persson “put out an alpha which proved so popular that he held a convention in Las Vegas to celebrate its full release. Now such releases are common, and are an increasingly viable route to market for indies without marketing budgets.”
0x10c
At the end of 2011 Persson handed Minecraft to Jens Bergensten and started work on a space game, 0x10c. He shelved it in August 2013. Engadget reported his reasoning: he did not want to become “another under-delivering visionary game designer”. On Twitter, in words Edge reprinted that November, he put it more briefly: “It was much easier to have grand plans when nobody knew who I was. The gaming world doesn’t need more under delivering visionaries.”
Leaving Mojang
By 2012 Persson was already saying that Mojang’s success meant it no longer fitted the word “indie”. On 15 September 2014 Microsoft announced that it would buy Mojang for $2.5 billion, and Persson, Porser and Manneh all left when the deal closed that November. Persson explained why on his blog. A few weeks earlier, he wrote, “the internet exploded with hate against me over some kind of EULA situation that I had nothing to do with”.
I’m not an entrepreneur. I’m not a CEO. I’m a nerdy computer programmer who likes to have opinions on Twitter.
He did not want, he wrote, “to be a symbol, responsible for something huge that I don’t understand, that I don’t want to work on, that keeps coming back to me”. And: “It’s not about the money. It’s about my sanity.” He added that if he ever made something that seemed to gain traction, “I’ll probably abandon it immediately.”
Statements and distance
The opinions Persson shared on Twitter after the sale caused trouble for Minecraft’s owners. PCGamesN described his posts as “inflammatory statements and references to occasional conspiracy theories”. In March 2019 a test version of Minecraft removed the title-screen messages “Made by Notch!” and “The Work Of Notch!”, though his name stayed in the credits. In April a Microsoft spokesperson told Variety that Persson would not be invited to the game’s tenth-anniversary event, and that his “comments and opinions do not reflect those of Microsoft or Mojang and are not representative of Minecraft.”
Back to making games
In 2024 Persson announced a new studio, Bitshift Entertainment, and a first project, Levers and Chests. “The current plan is roguelike (in the old sense: cursed items, ridiculously broken mechanics, and so on) combined with a first-person dungeon crawler,” he wrote. At the start of 2025 he ran a poll on X asking whether he should make a spiritual successor to Minecraft instead, and the successor won. Within a week he had changed his mind. “Trust me, the spiritual successor would be way less fun than the dungeon roguelike,” he wrote. “They’re always kinda sad nostalgia dumps.”
Sources
- Alex Handy, “Interview: Markus ‘Notch’ Persson Talks Making Minecraft”, Gamasutra, 23 March 2010 (web, secondary): the Commodore 128 and his first game; King.com and the games he was proud of; Wurm Online’s maps; 6,400 copies sold and about 200 a day; the day job. https://www.gamedeveloper.com/pc/interview-markus-notch-persson-talks-making-i-minecraft-i-
- Edge issue 224, February 2011: Minecraft at “$350,000 per day at its peak”.
- Edge issue 236, January 2012, p. 116, editorial (“Who made Minecraft?”); p. 121, interview with Persson (players’ features, version 1.0.0).
- Edge issue 237, February 2012, studio profile of Mojang, pp. 79–84: Midasplayer, Porser’s quotation, Manneh’s company and the founding of Mojang in October 2010, as cited in the Mojang entry.
- Edge issue 244, September 2012: Persson on Mojang no longer fitting the term “indie”.
- Edge issue 258, October 2013: Minecraft and paid early releases.
- Edge issue 259, November 2013: Persson’s tweet about grand plans and “under delivering visionaries”.
- Daniel Cooper, “Notch explains decision to axe 0x10c, concentrate on ‘smaller’ games”, Engadget, 20 August 2013 (web, secondary). https://www.engadget.com/2013/08/20/notch-explains-why-0x10c-cancelled/
- Mike Futter, “Notch On Mojang Departure: ‘It’s About My Sanity’”, Game Informer, 15 September 2014, and Neil McAllister, “Microsoft buys Minecraft for $2.5bn. Notch: I’m getting the block outta here”, The Register, 15 September 2014 (web, secondary): quotations from Persson’s blog post. https://www.theregister.com/2014/09/15/notch_leaves_mojang/
- Microsoft News Center, “Minecraft to join Microsoft”, 15 September 2014 (web), and Microsoft’s Form 10-Q for the quarter ended 31 December 2014 (web), as cited in the Minecraft entry.
- Rachel Watts, PCGamesN, 29 April 2019, and Jeff Marchiafava, “Minecraft Creator Won’t Be At Minecraft Anniversary Event”, Game Informer, 29 April 2019 (web, secondary): Microsoft’s statement to Variety; PCGamesN’s description of his posts. https://www.pcgamesn.com/minecraft/minecraft-anniversary-notch
- Rob Thubron, TechSpot, 28 March 2019 (web, secondary): the title-screen messages removed, as cited in the Minecraft entry.
- 80.lv, 4 April 2024 and 9 January 2025 (web, secondary): Bitshift Entertainment and Levers and Chests; the abandoned Minecraft successor. https://80.lv/articles/minecraft-creator-launched-a-new-studio-bitshift-entertainment/
- Wikipedia, “Markus Persson” (web, secondary): date and place of birth; Wurm Online with Rolf Jansson (2006); leaving Midasplayer in 2009; the EULA controversy; 0x10c shelved in August 2013. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markus_Persson