Markus Persson

• 1. Introduction

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  In June 2014, Markus Persson posted a single line to his followers: "Anyone want to buy my share of Mojang so I can move on with my life? Getting hate for trying to do the right thing is not my gig." Persson is a Swedish programmer who goes by the pseudonym Notch, and he is the creator of Minecraft, the best-selling video game in history. By his own account the post was reportedly partly a joke. The offer was taken seriously anyway. This documentary asks how a boy with a home computer and a solitary streak came to build a game on that scale. It asks why someone at the summit of that success wanted out, and what he did with the freedom. It also asks why the company that bought his work later tried to put distance between itself and his name.

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• 2. Childhood in Edsbyn

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  Markus Alexej Persson was born in Stockholm on the 1st of June 1979, to a Finnish mother named Ritva and a Swedish father named Birger. He has one sister. The family lived in Edsbyn until he was seven. His father worked for the railroad there, his mother was a nurse, and young Markus spent much of his time exploring the woods with friends.

  Around the age of seven, his parents divorced, and the family moved back to Stockholm. He and his sister lived with their mother, while their father moved to a cabin in the countryside. Persson said in an interview that the family went hungry about once a month. He lost contact with his father for several years.

  According to Persson, his father struggled with depression, bipolar disorder, alcoholism and medication abuse, and was jailed for robberies. A partial recovery gave way to a relapse, which contributed to the divorce. His sister also experimented with drugs and ran away from home.

  Yet this same father is described as "a really big nerd" who built his own modem. He taught his son to use the family's Commodore 128. With his sister's help, Markus loaded type-in programs from computer magazines and played bootleg games. The first game he bought with his own money was The Bard's Tale.

  At seven he began programming on that Commodore 128, and at eight he finished his first game, a text-based adventure. By 1994 he knew he wanted to develop games for a living, but his teachers steered him toward graphic design. He studied it from age 15 to 18. Introverted but well-liked, he became a loner in secondary school and reportedly had only one friend. He never finished high school, though he was reportedly a good student. His first paid work turned out to be on the web.

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• 3. Before Minecraft

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  Persson began his career as a web designer. He then took a job at Game Federation, where he met a colleague named Rolf Jansson. In their spare time the two built Wurm Online, a game from 2006. It was released through a new company called Mojang Specifications AB.

  Persson left that project in late 2007. He wanted to use the name Mojang again, so Jansson agreed to rename the original company Onetoofree AB.

  From 2004 to 2009, Persson also worked at Midasplayer, later known as King. There he was a programmer, mostly building browser games in Flash. He later worked as a programmer for jAlbum.

  Alongside these jobs he made small games, entered a number of game design competitions, and joined discussions on the TIGSource forums, a web forum for independent game developers.

  One of his better-known personal projects was RubyDung, an isometric three-dimensional base-building game in the spirit of RollerCoaster Tycoon and Dwarf Fortress. He tried a first-person view like the one in Dungeon Keeper. The graphics looked too pixelated to him, so he dropped it.

  Then, in 2009, he found Infiniminer, a block-based, open-ended mining game. It convinced him to bring back the first-person mode and adopt the blocky look and block-building basics. RubyDung is the earliest known Minecraft prototype. The first people to play what grew from it would be members of the TIGSource forums.

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• 4. Minecraft Takes Off

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  On the 17th of May 2009, Persson released the original edition of Minecraft, later called the Classic version, on the TIGSource forums. He updated it often, guided by feedback from the forum's users. Through 2009 and 2010 the game passed through phases named Survival Test, Indev and Infdev.

  The Alpha version arrived on the 30th of June 2010. Until then Persson had kept his job at jAlbum. After Alpha succeeded, he moved to part-time work there in 2010, and he left later that same year.

  In September 2010 he travelled to the headquarters of Valve Corporation in Bellevue, Washington. He took part in a programming exercise and met Gabe Newell. Valve offered him a job. He turned it down so he could keep working on Minecraft.

  Minecraft entered its beta phase on the 20th of December 2010 and began spreading to other platforms, including mobile. By January 2011 it had one million registered accounts. Six months later it had ten million.

  By the 7th of November 2011 the game had sold over four million copies. Mojang held the first Minecon on the 18th and the 19th of November 2011 to celebrate the full release, and made it an annual event.

  On the 11th of December 2011, Persson handed creative control of Minecraft to Jens Bergensten and moved on to another game. The money kept growing without him. In 2013 Mojang recorded revenues of $330 million and profits of $129 million. Success on that scale came with a price that Persson would soon describe in public.

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• 5. Walking Away

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  Persson has said that intense media attention and public pressure left him exhausted by the job of running Minecraft and Mojang.

  In a blog post in September 2014 he wrote that he "didn't have the connection to my fans I thought I had." He wrote that he had "become a symbol." He also said he did not want to answer for Mojang's increasingly large operation.

  When he floated the idea of selling, Persson controlled a 71% stake in Mojang. Activision Blizzard, EA and Microsoft all showed significant interest. Forbes later reported that Microsoft wanted the purchase as a "tax dodge," a way to turn taxable excess cash into other assets.

  In September 2014 Microsoft agreed to buy Mojang for $2.5 billion, which made Persson a billionaire. He left the company once the deal was finalised in November. One account puts his net worth after the sale at US$1.5 billion. How he handled that wealth drew as much notice as the sale itself.

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• 6. Fortune and Family

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  In 2011 Persson married Elin Zetterstrand, a former moderator on the Minecraft forums whom he had dated for four years. They had a daughter together. By mid-2012 he was seeing little of the child. On the 15th of August 2012 he announced that he and his wife had filed for divorce, and it was finalised later that year.

  On the 14th of December 2011, Persson's father died by suicide with a handgun after heavy drinking. Persson told The New Yorker that his father was the only person who supported his decision to quit his day job. He said: "He was proud of me and made sure I knew. When I added the monsters to Minecraft, he told me that the dark caves became too scary for him. But I think that was the only true criticism I ever heard from him." Persson later admitted that he too suffered from depression and from highs and lows in his mood.

  Persson has criticised the stance of large game companies on piracy. He once stated that "piracy is not theft," viewing unauthorised downloads as potential future customers. In 2011 he said he was a member of the Pirate Party of Sweden. He is also a member of Mensa.

  He has donated to many charities, including Médecins Sans Frontières. Under his direction, Mojang spent a week developing Catacomb Snatch for the Humble Indie Bundle, which raised US$458,248 for charity. In 2012 he gave $250,000 to the Electronic Frontier Foundation. In 2011 he returned $3 million in dividends to Mojang employees.

  In 2014 Persson was one of the biggest taxpayers in Sweden. He lived in a multi-level penthouse in Östermalm, Stockholm, which he called "where the rich people live." In December 2014 he paid $70 million for a home in Trousdale Estates, a neighbourhood in Beverly Hills, California. It was a record sales price for Beverly Hills at the time, and he reportedly outbid Beyoncé and Jay-Z. Forbes put his 2023 net worth at around $1.2 billion. Beginning around 2016, his own words would draw attention of a different kind.

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• 7. Controversial Posts

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  Persson began receiving criticism for political and social opinions he shared on social media as early as 2016. One description calls him "an increasingly polarizing figure, tweeting offensive statements regarding race, the LGBTQ community, gender, and other topics."

  In 2017 he proposed a heterosexual pride holiday and wrote that those who opposed the idea deserved to be shot. After backlash he deleted the tweets and took the statements back, writing: "So yeah, it's about pride of daring to express, not about pride of being who you are. I get it now."

  Later that year he wrote that feminism is a "social disease" and insulted the game developer and feminist Zoë Quinn, although he was generally critical of the GamerGate movement. He called intersectional feminism a "framework for bigotry" and said the word mansplaining was itself sexist. He also tweeted "It's okay to be white," and stated that he believed in the Pizzagate conspiracy theory.

  In 2019 he tweeted a reference to QAnon, writing "Q is legit. Don't trust the media." Later that year he answered a pro-transgender internet meme by writing that people who encourage delusion are "absolutely evil." He also promoted claims that people were fined for using the wrong pronoun. A day later, after backlash, he tweeted that he had "no idea what being trans is like of course, but it's inspiring as hell when people open up and choose to actually be who they know themselves as."

  The consequences reached Minecraft itself. Microsoft removed two mentions of his name in the "19w13a" snapshot and did not invite him to the game's 10-year anniversary celebration. A spokesperson said his views "do not reflect those of Microsoft or Mojang." One mention survives in the End Poem, which describes "a flat, infinite world created by a man called Markus."

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• 8. The Other Games

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  Persson entered several Ludum Dare 48-hour game-making competitions. Breaking the Tower, for Ludum Dare No. 12, is set on a small island where players gather resources, construct buildings and train soldiers to destroy a large tower. It received brief attention from the gaming media. Metagun, a 2D platformer, was his entry for No. 18, and Prelude of the Chambered, a short first-person dungeon crawler, was his entry for No. 21. For No. 22, held from the 16th to the 19th of December 2011, he wrote Minicraft in Java. It is a small top-down survival game with similarities to Zelda, influenced by Minecraft.

  On the 5th of August 2011, Persson revealed on his Tumblr blog that a Swedish law firm representing Bethesda Softworks was suing him. The dispute concerned Scrolls, a game he had conceived with Jakob Porsér using elements of board games and collectible card games. Bethesda claimed the name conflicted with its Elder Scrolls series. Persson said Porsér would be developing the game. On the 17th of August he challenged Bethesda to a Quake 3 tournament to decide the outcome, and on the 27th of September he confirmed the case was going to court. ZeniMax Media, Bethesda's owner, announced a settlement in March 2012 that let Mojang keep using the Scrolls trademark. In 2018 the game was made free and renamed Caller's Bane.

  In March 2012, Persson began pre-production on a space game set in the distant future. On April Fools' Day, Mojang launched a satirical website for Mars Effect, a parody of Mass Effect, citing the Bethesda lawsuit as inspiration. On the 4th of April the studio revealed the real project, 0x10c, pronounced "Ten to the C," as a space sandbox. Persson officially halted production in August 2013. C418, the composer of its soundtrack and of Minecraft's, released an album of the music he had made for it.

  In 2013 Persson made a free game called Shambles in the Unity engine. Cliffhorse followed on the first day of E3 2014. He programmed this humorous game in two hours, using Unity and free assets, and drew on Skyrim physics, Goat Simulator, Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing and "the more embarrassing minimum-effort Greenlight games." Players were told to donate Dogecoin to "buy" it before downloading, and it gathered over 280,000 dogecoins.

  After the sale, Persson worked on several small projects. He founded a company called Rubberbrain AB with Porsér, and by 2021 it had no games despite spending SEK 60 million. It was relaunched as Bitshift Entertainment, LLC on the 28th of March 2024. In 2020 he said he was interested in starting a new studio and making virtual reality games. He also created a series of narrative-driven immersive events called ".party," with extensive visual effects, which has been hosted in multiple cities.

  At the beginning of 2025, he decided to make a spiritual successor to Minecraft, called "Minecraft 2," after a poll on X went that way. After talking to his team, he shortly reversed course. He chose the poll's other option instead, a roguelike titled Levers and Chests.

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