Minecraft: The Unlikely Tale of Markus "Notch" Persson and the Game that Changed Everything by Daniel Goldberg, Linus Larsson Read Free Book Online

colleagues, a different image emerges. When with his closest coworkers, Markus was happy and open. He was the one who made sure they went for beers after work or got together for a couple of rounds of Counter-Strike or Team Fortress 2 during their lunch break. People at work shared the same interests, the same deeply rooted fascination with computer games and programming, and were just as nerdy as he was.
    Markus found a better outlet for his ambitions outside of work. He and Rolf Jansson had already realized their plan to develop a game together. It was titled Wurm Online , and it was an extremely ambitious project for two amateur developers. An online role-playing game, Wurm Online was a spacious and open world, where a large number of players took part simultaneously. The game differed from others of the same genre (the immensely popular World of Warcraft , for example) mainly in its openness. The world born of Markus and Rolf’s vision was one where the players were free to change anything they wanted—to build houses, dig mineshafts, earn money, or wage war on one another, for example.

Markus Persson and Elin Zetterstrand playing video games at the Mojang office in Stockholm. Photo courtesy of Elin Zetterstrand. Photo by Joshua Corsen (@averad).
    When Markus began working for Midasplayer, Wurm Online had already been live for a couple of months. The two friends spent almost all their free time on the game, thinking, planning, and programming together until the early morning hours. They didn’t make any money from it, at least not yet, but for Markus and Rolf it was enough just to see how increasing numbers of players found their way to their fantasy world and chose to stay inside it. For Markus, Wurm Online was a creative refuge. There, he could test his own ideas and develop the game as he wished, without asking his managers at Midasplayer for permission.
    With time, Markus became a knowledgeable and experienced game programmer, particularly with the Java programming language. With experience came the task of teaching newcomers at the firm. Management often had to contend with the fact that those who showed up for the job interviews didn’t always know a lot about game development. Most often, they figured it would work out anyway and counted on the more experienced developers to take the new talent under their wings.
    Among the new talent was Jakob Porser, who had recently become a father and had been a consultant before his job vanished in the dot-com crash a couple of years earlier. After that he took a course in creative programming at the college in Gävle—the same course that DICE’s CEO, Karl Magnus Troedsson, had completed barely ten years earlier. Jakob then moved to Stockholm to find work, and Midasplayer hired him. To learn more, he was assigned to sit next to Markus. With his dark mop of hair, his rectangular glasses, and his quick speech, Jakob seemed very different from Markus. Besides, he had a baby to support, which meant that he felt differently about his new job. Earning a paycheck was his highest priority.
    But like Markus, Jakob loved computer games, and the two programmers immediately hit it off. They had the same interests and sense of humor and could end up sitting for hours at work, absorbed in conversations about obscure computer games. As with Rolf Jansson a couple of years earlier, Markus and Jakob had a shared enthusiasm for Magic: The Gathering, and when they weren’t playing the game themselves, they were discussing ways to improve it.
    Markus told Jakob about his experiences with Wurm Online . Jakob listened with interest and told Markus about the game he dreamed of developing. It would be a kind of digital version of Magic: The Gathering, where the cards were stored in the computer and the players could meet in matches over the Internet; a strategy game in a fantasy world, but also inspired by the card collecting and trading that characterized Magic. Markus loved it. After work