The Minecraft Creator Markus Persson Faces Life After Fame : The New Yorker

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. Now you are fighting for survival, digging a shelter with your bare hands, and cowering in the dark till the sun shoos your tormentors back into hiding. The next morning, you can choose to turn your cave into a castle, venturing out to gather the necessary raw materials to laminate your new abode’s floor or to build a stove on which you can cook your meat. Or you can dig down to the center of the Earth, searching for rare materials to fashion gleaming armor or indestructible pickaxes. Some players embark upon grand designs, recreating a famous piece of architecture or a monument using the game’s fundamental materials. However you choose to express your creativity, every night you must retreat into your creation to hide.

This disempowerment runs contrary to the ideas of most video games. “Infinite power just isn’t very interesting, no matter what game you’re playing,” Persson said. “It’s much more fun when you have a limited tool set to use against the odds. Usually, a new player to Minecraft doesn’t make it through the first night. They’re just not prepared for the danger. It’s a harsh lesson but it establishes the rules.”

Persson stopped working on Minecraft in December, 2011, in order to pursue new projects. One, a complex virtual board game with card-game elements, dubbed Scrolls, is set for release later this year. Another, the unpronounceable 0x10c, a trading game set in space, influenced by the U.S. science-fiction television series “Firefly” and the seminal 1984 British computer game Elite, is still in the early stages of development.

Is Minecraft a once-in-a-lifetime success—a “Tainted Love,” a Tetris—or a foundational work for the next great video-game auteur, like the creator of Sim City and The Sims, Will Wright? Persson is unequivocal. “I definitely think Minecraft is a freak thing,” he said. “There’s no way you could replicate it intentionally. And yes, I’m starting to feel writer’s block as a result. I’m not sure if it’s pressure to repeat…” He paused and looked to the floor, groping for the source of this creative impasse. “Actually, it is the pressure to repeat. And with Minecraft it was just easier, because nobody knew who I was. Now I post a new idea and millions of people scrutinize it. There’s a conflict between the joy of being able to do whatever I want and the remarkable pressure of a watching world. I don’t know how to switch it off.”

Persson grew up in Edsbyn, a provincial town near Sweden’s eastern coast. “My strongest early memory is of my dad dragging me through very deep snow on a sled,” he said. “I looked up at him and he seemed annoyed at me. Perhaps it was tough work, dragging me, or perhaps I had been crying. And I realized that—hang on—he’s actually a real person, with his own perception of things. It’s not just me looking at things; he is also looking at things.”

It was in Edsbyn that Persson’s father, a railroad worker, taught him to use the family computer, a Commodore 128. “We had a number of bootleg games—some weird Mickey Mouse tower game and Balderdash. The first game I actually bought myself with my own money was The Bard’s Tale.” Computer magazines of the day would print strings of code on their back pages, which could be transcribed by the reader to create a playable game, and this code-by-numbers task gave Persson his first experience of what would later become his profession. “My sister would read the lines out to me and I would tap them into the computer,” he says. “After a while, I figured out that if you didn’t type out exactly what they told you then something different would happen, where you finally ran the game. That sense of power was intoxicating.”

When he was seven, the family moved to Stockholm. Persson fell in with a crowd of schoolboy programmers when he was thirteen, and they competed with one another to create the most impressive effects on their Atari STs. “One time, I managed to fill the screen with huge text that scrolled incredibly quickly,” he recalled. “My friend was on vacation, so I put the code on a disc and attached a Post-it note saying ‘Look what I did!’ and left it in his mailbox. ” By 1994, Persson knew he wanted to make games for a living, but his teachers advised him to study graphic design, which led to his first job, as a Web designer. “I didn’t stay there, because I was a bit arrogant and thought I could just go and make games,” he says. “But then the dot-com crash happened and I couldn’t get a job.”

After two years living at home with his mother, Persson landed a job at a Web-game company, where he worked as a programmer and designer on no fewer than thirty Flash games. In his spare time, he continued to work on his own projects, entering competitions to make games with tight memory constraints in order to focus his creativity. “I was learning things about game design in my day job,” he said. “But really it was the puzzle-solving nature of programming that appealed.” When Persson began work on Minecraft, in early 2009, he knew that this was the game he had been waiting to make. He went part-time at his job in order to free himself up to work on the game, and finally handed in his notice on his birthday, June 1st, the following year. Despite the bold step into full-time indie-game development, he never envisaged Minecraft becoming such a widespread success. “I expected it to be about six to twelve months of work, and hoped that it might earn enough money to fund development of a subsequent game.” He released the full version on PC, and within twelve months the game had been downloaded more than six million times and Persson was struggling to keep up with player requests for new features and bug fixes while simultaneously trying to deal with problems closer to home.

During Persson’s teen-age years, his father relapsed into substance abuse, which he had battled with for years, unbeknownst to his children. His drinking ended his marriage to Persson’s mother, and he became estranged from his son for a few years. He moved away from Stockholm (“both to avoid the city’s influence and to isolate himself”) but remained interested in and engaged with his son’s work. “He usually gave me the fatherly version of game criticism, saying, They’re all brilliant, of course,” says Persson. “When I decided I wanted to quit my day job and work on my own games, he was the only person who supported my decision. 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 would occasionally visit his father in the Swedish countryside. During a spring visit a few years ago, they drove to a frozen lake to walk his father’s dog. While they were drinking coffee and eating sandwiches, the dog ran out onto the ice, which gave way moments later. The pet plunged into the paralyzingly cold water, thrashing for a few moments, before dozily resting its front paws on the lip of the ice. To Persson’s dismay, his father lay down on the ice and began hoisting himself toward the dog. “I’m running around all over the place, looking for a long stick,” he said. “I don’t know what I was planning on doing. It just seemed important to find a stick right then. I found one, turned around and saw my dad right next to the dog at the exact moment the ice broke loose, and tipped him in. I screamed. A moment later, he stood up. The water only came up to his hips.”

Persson says that the most upsetting thing about the episode was the speed at which a beautiful scene turned into disastrous one. This emotional journey was echoed in 2011. Persson was planning his father’s return to Stockholm, and had just rented an apartment for him on the outskirts of the city, when his father shot himself in the head. “I now have an entire life to live without him existing,” he wrote on his Web site last Christmas. Persson not only had lost his father, he began to worry about protecting himself against the demons he had battled with. “I feel like there is this looming cloud over my life. Those quiet thoughts: Oh, it happened to him, and this stuff sometimes goes in generations. I think I just have to ensure I don’t isolate myself. That’s what he did he did, out there in the countryside.”

This pressing desire to integrate, to live in community, is reflected in Mojang (Swedish for gadget), the company that Persson founded when Minecraft’s maintenance and development became too much for one man to handle. Mojang, which employs twenty-odd people, has a flat management structure and loose working hours. “When you have the kind of success Minecraft has brought, you can just choose yourself the way you want to do things,” said Persson. “I don’t want to feel like I’m in charge or anything. Of course, it doesn’t really work that way, because we all know I’m the founder. But I try to have a studio where people go to make games for the fun of it, not just because some investor has said we have to make money.”

Persson is an outspoken critic of publishers, who he believes curtail creativity in the games industry in the search for short-term gains. He once accused Electronic Arts of “methodically destroying the games industry,” a criticism his independence from the studio system frees him to make. “Publishers might be a necessary thing,” he said. “but it’s inevitable that they will shift the focus from games being made by people who want to make good games to people who want to make money.” The power balance in the video-game industry is shifting in favor of independent creators—in 2012, the Xbox 360 version of Minecraft overtook Activision’s blockbuster Call of Duty: Modern Warfare as the most played game on the system. In Persson’s view, this benefits players more than anybody: “The more studios that can remove themselves from the publisher system, the more games that will be made out of love rather than for profit.”

Persson actively campaigns for broad digital rights and freedom of speech on the Internet. (In December, he donated two hundred and fifty thousand dollars to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the U.S.-based international nonprofit digital-rights group.) “The Internet is this great and generous piece of human evolution, and then we have corporations and governments trying to lock it down for short-term profit,” he said. His interest in freedom of expression can be seen in Minecraft’s DNA, which has allowed its players to recreate everything from the Taj Mahal to the Starship Enterprise, which has attracted litigious interest. “Soon after the impressive video of that creation went around the Internet, I was sent a cease-and-desist letter from Universal Studios. I had to explain that we hadn’t made it. It’s a bit like sending a letter to Adobe because somebody drew a copyrighted image in Photoshop.”

It is this type of stand that has made Persson a well-liked figure in the independent-game movement. But it’s true that he can afford to take the anti-corporation stance. Each Minecraft sale flows straight to Mojang’s pocket—there are no middlemen—and, since the game is digitally distributed, there is no physical product to manufacture, store, or ship. After Minecraft, none of Persson’s subsequent games need to turn a profit. In 2011, he gave his £2.2 million Mojang dividend to his employees. “The money is a strange one,” he says. “I’m slowly getting used to it, but it’s a Swedish trait that we’re not supposed to be proud of what we’ve done. We’re supposed to be modest. So at first, I had a really hard time spending any of the profits. Also, what if the game stopped selling? But after a while, I thought about all of the things I’d wanted to do before I had money. So I introduced a rule: I’m allowed to spend half of anything I make. That way I will never be broke. Even if I spend extravagant amounts of money, I will still have extravagant amounts of money.”

Even so, Persson’s extravagancies are somewhat practical. He flies to events in private jets and throws large hospitality parties for fans, such as the one held in San Francisco a few days after we met. (When Justice, the A-list d.j. he had booked to play the event, was refused entry to the U.S. at the last minute, Persson phoned Skrillex to perform as a stand-in). “Other than that, I don’t know,” he says, picking his ear. “I have the latest computer?”

With his expansive following, Persson is able to spread the wealth, too, at least indirectly. Getting “notched”—whereby Persson directs his followers towards a new game—can result in tens of thousands of sales for an indie game maker. Minecraft’s maker is a kingmaker in the video-game realm. “There are so many sides to that,” he says. “I try to tweet about the games I love and feel passionate about. But it got to the stage where I could ‘make’ a small studio, and so it began to feel like a duty. I started promoting games that I wasn’t so enthusiastic about.”

Following his father’s suicide, Persson has been simplifying his life. He has moved on from active Minecraft development, and he has committed to not being coerced into promoting people and products in which he does not fully believe. Last year, he also got divorced from his wife—a former moderator on the Minecraft forums—whom he had been dating for four years and married to for one. “I’m a little confused by love,” he said. “I am a romantic person, and maybe have this Hollywood perception of love… but then, it’s never really like the movies. I didn’t really have much luck with women when I was younger, so on some level I feel like I don’t really belong. Maybe everyone feels like that to some degree.”

The sense of not belonging is, of course, the essence of teen-age existence, and perhaps it is this enduring quality that Persson’s youth following responds to, as well as the example he presents of the nerd made good, of success in the face of a certain emotional vagrancy. It’s this innocence that has informed his games. Minecraft is at its most beguiling when experienced with a child’s ambition: to explore, to create, and to share those experiences with others. But the eighteen months following Persson’s departure from Minecraft’s development have changed his life in irreversible ways. It will be harder for his next game, 0x10c to express the same artful simplicity. Regardless of whether he can successfully break the writer’s block or not, at thirty-three Persson is moneyed and storied. What ambitions remain for the epitome of the indie success story? “I have the ability to get code done, but I’m impatient and it’s scrappy as a result,” he said. “Maybe that helped me with Minecraft, as it came quickly. But, well, at some point, I’d like to actually become a good programmer.”

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Photograph, of Markus Persson, in 2011, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.