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

they’d go to a pizza shop and remain there until late into the evenings, fleshing out Jakob’s roughly outlined ideas, discussing game mechanics, and polishing their plans for the future.
    Markus also met his future wife at Midasplayer. One day at work, he passed by a conference room on his way to his office and saw through the glass wall a short woman sitting with her back toward him. One of the managers was on the other side of the desk. It was obviously a job interview. The girl being interviewed was Elin, and she was hired a few weeks later as an online community coordinator. Her job was to manage the company’s contact with users of Midasplayer’s casino games, making sure that everything worked and helping players solve any issues.
    Elin’s first day at Midasplayer was June 1, which also happened to be Markus’s birthday. That evening, all the programmers went out to celebrate, and Elin came along. Markus had already decided he wanted to get to know her and now, with a couple of beers under his belt, he mustered the courage and introduced himself. The exchange must have looked comical—Elin is as short and thin as Markus is tall and large—but the two remained in each other’s company the whole evening. They talked about computer games, and even though Elin was no programmer, she was just as devoted to games as Markus. They even had the same tastes.
    Computer games brought Markus and Elin closer during their initial friendship. Every day at lunch they connected their computers and tried to kill each other in Team Fortress 2 (Markus won most of the games then, says Elin, but she makes it very clear that today she gets at least as many points as he does.) They soon began spending more time together; they went out after work, then out to dinner, then to the amusement park Gröna Lund. His colleagues soon realized that Markus and the girl from the casino department were a thing.
    Elin also became the person Markus went to when he needed to vent his irritation over the managers at Midasplayer. It was increasingly obvious that he wasn’t happy at work. He liked being responsible for every aspect of a game project, from idea to implementation, and it drove him crazy having click statistics and profit as the only goals to strive for.
    “They just don’t get it,” he would say to Elin after work. “They’re idiots.”
    When Markus began working at Midasplayer, company policy forbade employees from making money on independently developed games. That wasn’t particularly odd; few employers like to have their employees moonlighting with what can be seen as a competitive enterprise. However, during Midasplayer’s first year, no one took the rule seriously. Besides Wurm Online , which Markus had worked on before he was even hired at the company, he kept developing his own little games in his free time, mostly as a way to explore the ideas he wasn’t allowed to pursue at work.
    Management didn’t really think that Markus’s amateur coding was a problem. It didn’t disturb his workday at the company, and there was nothing to complain about in Markus’s performance. They just looked the other way. However, the more Midasplayer grew, the more strictly the rules were enforced, and Markus felt it firsthand one day in the fall of 2008. He had just finished his latest hobby project, a game called Blast Passage . It was a kind of combination of two classic arcade games, Bomberman and Gauntlet , and for those who know their gaming history, the result was both cleverly allusive and appealing. Blast Passage was simple, fun, and full of winks to the old eighties titles that inspired it. Not without certain pride, Markus sent out an e-mail to the other employees at Midasplayer with a link, encouraging them to try it out. The reaction was not what Markus expected.
    Versions of what actually happened differ, depending on whom you ask. Markus describes how, almost immediately after sending the e-mail, he was called into a