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

conference room. There, he was severely reprimanded by Lars Markgren, director of the company and the person who had founded Midasplayer a couple of years earlier. Lars Markgren reminded him of the rules in his contract, emphasizing that all games Markus developed belonged to Midasplayer and that this clause applied to Blast Passage . Markus received a warning and the orders to shape up.
    Lars Markgren has another recollection of what happened. What Markus calls a reprimand, Lars describes as a discussion. Markus had permission to work with Wurm Online in his free time, says Lars Markgren, but Blast Passage was too similar to the games Midasplayer developed. Lars suggested that Markus adapt the game to Midasplayer customers and release it to the public. A version of Blast Passage was uploaded onto King.com shortly thereafter. It never became a huge success; the typical player at King.com isn’t particularly well versed in gaming history and prefers a few moments of recreation to clever references. Midaplayer customers just weren’t interested in Blast Passage .
    The conflict had a huge impact on Markus. His freedom to work on his own projects had been perhaps the main reason why he hadn’t left Midasplayer earlier.
    “Why should I stay here?” Markus asked himself.
    In moments like that, he liked to think back to the discussions he’d had with Jakob. The two of them had become more and more convinced that they wanted to start their own game studio in due time. Markus now had experience developing a game of his own; his years with Wurm Online had showed him it could be done if you applied yourself enough. Also, Jakob’s idea (the basis of the game that would later become Scrolls ) felt too promising to just set aside, and they had several other ideas they wanted to sink their teeth into. However, with the new, stricter Midasplayer rules, the possibility felt remote.
    No matter how much thought Markus gave it, he couldn’t figure out how to make the equation add up. He could give notice and throw himself wholeheartedly into his own games—but then he wouldn’t be able to afford food or the roof over his head. Or he could stay at Midasplayer and continue to live well on the money he made, and totally abandon his dream of creating the games he really loved.
    Shortly thereafter, Markus was given a way out. He interviewed for and accepted a position at Avalanche, a game studio with over two hundred employees and some of the Swedish gaming industry’s most ambitious titles in their portfolio. Their hit game, Just Cause 2 , released in 2010, cost over $3 million to develop and is regarded, along with the Battlefield series, as one of the Swedish game industry’s most elaborate projects ever.
    Many young game developers dream of working for a studio like Avalanche. Markus hated it. Each morning, he felt like a factory worker on his way to his place on the assembly line. The project he worked on was so huge he hardly knew what the end result would look like. As a programmer, he had only sporadic contact with the game’s design team, which meant that he could work for days on animation tools for game characters without even knowing how the character in the game would look. He felt irrelevant, like a tiny cog in a machine so large that he didn’t understand how it worked. Markus could only stomach two weeks of it. Then he gave his notice and left, returning hat in hand to his old managers and job at Midasplayer.
    In early 2009 someone threw Markus another lifeline. An acquaintance at a programming forum tipped off Markus about a job at Jalbum. The small, newly launched company had developed a platform for creating photo albums online. The responsibilities listed for the job were about as far away from game development as a programmer could get, but at that point it didn’t matter to Markus; he just needed to get away from Midasplayer.
    Markus sent in his application and was called for an interview. On the spot, Markus made