The Creator
When Markus Persson visited Las Vegas in 2011, for the first international convention held in honor of Minecraft, the video game he designed and built, a young mother strode up and asked him not to kiss her baby but to sign it. “I lean in with the pen and the child immediately starts crying,” he recalled as we talked in the stratospheric hotel suite he was staying in for the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco last month. Persson, thirty-three, has fixed, handsome eyes and a deep-dimpled smile that offsets his baldpate and thickening torso. “I recoil and apologize—I mean, it’s not like I’m setting the kid on fire or anything—but she insists. It was a frightening moment for me, and not just that natural shock of making an infant cry.”
Since the game’s release, in 2009, Minecraft has sold in excess of twenty million copies, earned armfuls of prestigious awards, and secured merchandising deals with LEGO and other toymakers. Last year, Persson earned over a hundred million dollars from the game and its merchandise. Persson—better known to his global army of teen-age followers by his Internet handle, Notch—has a raggedy, un-marketed charm. He is, by his own admission, only a workmanlike coder, not a ruthless businessman. “I’ve never run a company before and I don’t want to feel like a boss,” he said. “I just want to turn up and do my work.”
Persson and his game continue to confound the wisdom of video-game critics, consultants, and publishing mavens. For one, Minecraft looks nothing like the multi-million-dollar blockbusters that usually line GameStop’s shelves; its graphics and sound effects are rudimentary. It is also willfully oblique, with no instruction manual and few explicit goals. At first, you are deposited in a unique, procedurally generated world built from a palette of colored one-by-one square building blocks that comprise its mountains, valleys, lakes and clouds. Faced with this canvas, at first your task is mere exploration, charting the terrain around you.
Then night falls and monsters rise: dead-eyed zombies, skeletons, and camouflaged creepers that pursue you with terrifying single-mindedness....MORE
