Minecraft: The Unlikely Tale of Markus "Notch" Persson and the Game that Changed Everything (12 page)

With the blocky suburb in place, Svensk Byggtjänst invited young people and put them in front of computers with a server connection. The participants were set free to build or tear down as they pleased, or to “visualize ideas,” as the sponsors prefer to call it. Since then, several similar seminars have taken place. The construction company Telge-Hovsjö was one of the first to take heed of this odd way of city planning and other projects, and plan to be the first company in the world to use sketches and drawings done in
Minecraft
in their formal construction documents for a future project.

Joel Levin loves examples like these. He thinks of
Minecraft
as a Trojan horse. The game lets him sneak education into an environment where the students feel at home. Similar to the way
Minecraft
makes it more fun to plan cities, it helps Levin get students to show an interest in subjects they would ordinarily tire of after a couple of minutes. In academic language, this is called “gamification”: the use of the motivation techniques and reward structures that are built into all good games to enliven tasks that would otherwise be insufferably boring.

Carl Manneh is quick to bring up both MinecraftEdu and the construction project in Fisksätra when he talks about
Minecraft
. He is clearly proud to be a part of what Santeri Koivisto and Joel Levin are doing. There are probably several reasons for this. Before he entered the Internet business, Carl worked as a substitute teacher, so he knows how difficult it can be to motivate bored students to care about what happens on the whiteboard in front of them. If MinecraftEdu is successful, it would be a huge step in making Mojang’s enormous success about more than just entertainment. Creating the year’s most talked-about and lucrative Internet company is one thing. Changing everyday life for students and teachers in classrooms around the world is something entirely different. Much more important, some would say. Maybe a small part of Carl agrees.

Chapter 14

Becoming a LEGO

Markus was tired
but happy when he returned home from the E3 Expo in Los Angeles. He’d been surrounded constantly, mingling with gamer fans and business VIPs alike. Still, it was nice to be back home. Everything was going exactly as he’d hoped at Mojang. Everyday life had settled in at the office. Normal mornings at the Mojang premises didn’t completely live up to the playhouse picture suggested by its interior design. There was music on low in the background and the programmers were focused at their computers, the graphics people hunched over their screens.

That’s not to say the workplace was always quiet. Discussions could become heated in the office and, thanks to the company’s maximally liberal Twitter policy, reach far beyond the building. One major topic of debate during 2011 concerned a dragon. Most classically designed computer games have an endgame boss, the biggest, most difficult and final monster to be conquered before the game is completed. Markus felt that
Minecraft
needed something like that. Fans had been clamoring for an end boss for a long time, and in an interview Markus had said in passing that you should be able to “kill a dragon or something.”

Jens lashed out, one of the few instances when the two didn’t agree about how the game should develop. Dragons are (and this is a view he stolidly stands by to this day) a boring and unimaginative choice. But a dragon it would be. By
Minecraft
standards, the one they designed was an impressive creature—large, black, and with wings that, in spite of their blocky shapes, moved softly up and down when the creature flew.

Most of the employees were on vacation in the summer. The spring had been intense, and only a few months later it would be time for another trip to the United States, when the finished version of
Minecraft
would be released at MineCon in Las Vegas. A lot needed to be done before then.

Jakob had taken his family to Gotland to relax. At MineCon, he and the others would also show a playable version of
Scrolls
for the first time. The game had already received a ton of attention in the games press. A lot of people wanted to know what Mojang would do after
Minecraft
. Plenty of work on the new game remained; Jakob knew that many long days at the office awaited him when he returned from his vacation.

In another part of the world, there was already feverish activity concerning
Scrolls
. In the city of Rockville, Maryland, a group of lawyers hired by the game company ZeniMax had had turned their gaze toward Jakob’s new game. ZeniMax is a large publisher, with many well-known game studios in its stable. Among them are id Software, which developed legendary games like
Doom
and
Quake
; and Bethesda Softworks, with the role-playing series
The Elder
Scrolls
on their merit list.

The Elder
Scrolls
-series has occupied a special place in the hearts of many gamers since the first part was released in 1994. The games are gigantic, meticulously detailed adventures in a fantasy world, always created with player freedom as the guiding design principle. There are powerful dragons, armored knights, and flame-wielding magicians, loads of secrets to discover and treasures to plunder. In an
Elder
Scrolls
game, players explore the world at their own pace and can choose the order in which to accept tasks and challenges.

The series is one of Markus’s favorites, and it’s fair to assume that
The Elder
Scrolls
was among the inspirations when he and Rolf Jansson began designing
Wurm Online
. Now Bethesda was working on finishing the next
Elder
Scrolls
game, titled
Skyrim
. Just like hundreds of thousands of others, Markus and Jakob had planned to spend a good part of the winter in front of their screens with the game.

But the fact that Mojang had landed in the sights of ZeniMax had little to do with
Skyrim
, and even less to do with
Minecraft
. The corporate lawyers had noted the similarity between the name Mojang had chosen for its next project and their series. Too similar, they felt, and decided to do something about it.

Jakob had just returned from vacation when a letter from ZeniMax arrived at the office. It contained a document fifteen pages long and written in complicated legalese. But the central message was unmistakable. According to ZeniMax’s lawyers, Mojang was not allowed to name its game “
Scrolls
.” It was so similar to the name of Bethesda’s series that they regarded it as a trademark infringement. Change the name, the American company advised them starkly. If they didn’t, the case would go to court.

This wasn’t the first time the American company had been in contact. Earlier in the fall, Mojang had applied for a trademark for the title
Scrolls
. It had been mostly to test the waters. Neither Jakob nor anyone else at Mojang had any idea whether you could really trademark a single word. It didn’t take long before ZeniMax contacted them asking about the project. Even then, the Americans made it clear that they considered the title a problem. From ZeniMax’s point of view, the two names—
Scrolls
and
The Elder
Scrolls
—were too similar.

Markus and Jakob wanted to avoid a conflict. They immediately suggested a subtitle for their own game. They would even consider skipping the trademark (but still call their game
Scrolls
), if it would get ZeniMax off their backs. The American lawyers rebuffed both suggestions, but didn’t send an immediate counteroffer. Everything went quiet after that. Jakob figured the issue was settled. The letter from ZeniMax he now held in his hand proved otherwise, beyond the shadow of a doubt.

The board of Mojang—Markus, Carl, and Jakob—met to discuss what they should do about it. They decided that the best defense is a good offense. Just folding and “letting them kick us around,” as Jakob puts it, was never an option. Mojang’s next game would be named
Scrolls
, no matter the cost.

Initially, it was difficult for them to take the lawsuit seriously. In a blog posting, just a few weeks after the threat of a lawsuit dropped through the mail chute, Markus suggested another way of resolving the conflict.

“I challenge Bethesda to a game of
Quake
3
. Three of our best warriors against three of your best warriors. We select one level, you select the other,” he wrote in a blog post. “If we win, you drop the lawsuit. If you win, we will change the name of
Scrolls
to something you’re fine with.”

He never received an answer. Another time, Carl tried to resolve the whole deal with an e-mail to Robert Altman, the top boss at ZeniMax. Can’t we just meet and try to work this out, he suggested, offering him a cup of coffee.

“I’m not interested in coffee,” was the short reply.

In September, ZeniMax submitted its formal complaint to Stockholm’s district court. Many of the developers who worked for Bethesda were ashamed of their mother company’s actions, especially since they—like most others in the business—were full of admiration for what Mojang had done with
Minecraft
.

“This is a business matter based on how trademark law works, and it will continue to be dealt with by lawyers who understand it, not by me or our developers,” said Bethesda’s marketing director, Pete Hines, in an interview. Markus expressed himself in similar terms.

“I am a huge fan of Bethesda’s work, and I am looking forward to
Skyrim
more than I am any other game this year,” he wrote in an e-mail to the gaming site Kotaku.com.

It was Carl’s job as CEO to solve the problem, but it had the greatest impact on Jakob. When he and Markus had started Mojang the year before, the two projects came side by side:
Scrolls
from Jakob and
Minecraft
from Markus. Markus’s game concept was already one of gaming history’s biggest hits, but Jakob’s contribution hadn’t even left the drawing board yet. Jakob had begun to feel anxious. How would Mojang’s millions of fans—who loved
Minecraft
more than any other game—receive his project? Eventually, the commotion around Markus’s game would subside. Then it would be important to have something new to show.

It was not likely that
Scrolls
would be as big a success as
Minecraft
. Everyone involved was careful to stress that. But it was important to show the world that Mojang was more than a one-hit wonder. Jakob was convinced that
Scrolls
would do the job. If it flopped, he would have to take the blame.

For Jakob, the legal process with ZeniMax came to represent everything he hated about the established game industry. As a child, he’d dreamed of becoming a lawyer, but his dealings with the Zenimax legal team felt nothing like like the heroic agents of justice he remembered from his childhood evenings in front of the TV.

Jakob Porser. Photo by Elin Zetterstrand.

Trademark disputes are a dime a dozen in the business world. This case would probably have passed unnoted if it hadn’t involved two such different parties. In one corner stood Mojang, the most highly praised indie developer in the gaming world. In the other, the huge company, ZeniMax, with several enormously popular games in their portfolio and an army of attorneys at their disposal. You might see the battle between Mojang and ZeniMax as pure harassment, a giant company using legal brawn to protect its revenue and repress a startup. That was exactly how the employees at Mojang felt, and it was the story that created headlines in the gaming press during the summer.

Or you could see it as Mojang’s first real encounter with the world of big business, which they inescapably were becoming part of. Regardless of Markus’s self-image, ZeniMax had long since ceased to view Mojang as a harmless little indie company. Mojang was pulling in several million dollars and was one of the gaming world’s most talked-about companies. For ZeniMax, the creators of
Minecraft
weren’t innocent startups. They were perfectly valid competitors.

In October, just weeks before MineCon in Las Vegas, Mojang won an important first victory. The Stockholm District Court threw out ZeniMax’s demand for a so-called temporary injunction, which would have prevented Mojang from using the name “
Scrolls
” during the term of the court case. In the ruling, the court states that the names are not easily confused. ZeniMax could have withdrawn its charges then, but the publishing company stuck to its guns. Now what remained was either a trial or a settlement.

As the court case dragged on, the attention surrounding
Minecraft
brought other things forward that Markus would have rather not thought about. In the autumn,
Aftonbladet,
a Swedish daily tabloid, published an interview with Rolf Jansson, Markus’s old friend from his
Wurm Online
days. They only saw each other sporadically nowadays. His friendship with Rolf was just one of many things that Markus had been forced to put on the back burner in order to make time for everything concerning
Minecraft
.

Rolf still lived in Motala and now worked full-time with
Wurm Online
. Compared to most indie developers, he was doing quite well. The number of paying
Wurm Online
players was growing slowly but surely and had recently passed three thousand. Rolf made enough money to work full-time with the game and had even hired two more people at his firm. But he did miss working with Markus, and the success of
Wurm Online
did pale in comparison to that of
Minecraft
. About this time, Markus’s game was attracting more new players daily than Rolf Jansson had scraped together in almost eight years. But
Wurm Online
was the game Rolf had always dreamed of creating; working on your dream is something only a few game developers can actually achieve.

The article in
Aftonbladet
painted a picture of Markus screwing over Rolf: Markus had stolen the best ideas from
Wurm Online
and taken them to his own game. Rolf never says it outright, but readers still get the impression that Markus’s earlier collaborator was swindled out of both money and success. Markus comes across as being indifferent; he briefly answers only two of the reporter’s questions and then explains his desertion as frustration over not being able to influence
Wurm Online
in the way he wanted.

The article stirred up strong emotions in both Markus and Rolf. They discussed it in a telephone conversation that ended on a bad note. Looking back both say that
Aftonbladet
’s article presented an inaccurate image of reality, but neither can really say in what way. Markus is satisfied with stating that things were “taken out of context.” Rolf is very reluctant to answer questions about the whole thing, but offers this comment over the phone: “I am really glad that Markus has gotten rich. That comes from the heart. On the other hand, I’m not completely at peace with how it happened. I can’t think of anything else to say.”

Today, their friendship is complicated. Before, they could talk computer games for hours. Now they talk a couple of times per year, mostly on the phone, most often about business. Markus is still a partner in the company that runs
Wurm Online
. He is on the company board, but is careful to emphasize that he has no creative influence over the game. Their friendship has been replaced by a more “professional” relationship, as Rolf describes it. It’s obvious that as Markus’s success has grown, the two have drifted farther away from each other.

Mojang was founded on a pronounced indie mentality. The company would be small and agile and would only spend time on projects in which the employees were interested. That attitude was central to the vision that Carl and the others expressed together. It was sort of a mission statement, formulated shortly after the dinner at Ljunggrens when the company was founded: Mojang was to become the world’s most influential indie developer.

As the CEO of a successful, quickly growing company, it’s surprising that Carl would be supportive of such an ambition. Their central vision said nothing about revenue, growth, high profit margins, or new markets—nothing about success in business. It’s entirely possible to be influential without ever becoming rich (just ask Franz Kafka), and it must be said that Mojang rejects the easy money. A comparison with perhaps the most well-known cell-phone game in history,
Angry Birds
, illustrates that quite clearly. It was very deliberately developed into a giant industry with a steady stream of sequels, stuffed dolls, and a planned stock market introduction. Rovio, the company behind the game, exploited its new-won victory when sales shot up, and redefined itself from a small company with a handful of employees to a well-oiled machine, driven with laser precision by business-development principles. Nothing says that Mojang couldn’t go in the same direction.

Jakob snorts when Rovio is mentioned, calling it a one-trick pony.

“They only have one game idea and that’s actually a copy of an existing game, where they’ve inserted graphics from an old project. They had one hit, and now they’re milking it like crazy.”

There are two main reasons why Mojang’s view of growth is different. First of all, the company was started around an existing success. The three owners decided which direction the company would take and used their own capital to take it there. Second, you need to take a look at who started Mojang. Jakob and Markus have never made a secret of their complete lack of interest in money matters. They are almost proud of not comprehending money, contracts, and things they associate with men in suits and ties. Carl seldom wears clothes different from what the others wear, but at the end of the day, it is still his job to be that man in the suit and tie. Markus has described the CEO’s job this way: to take care of “the boring stuff,” because Markus wants to stay busy with the fun stuff.

That’s why there is no planned sequel to
Minecraft
or new levels available for download at an extra cost. According to the extant logic of the game business, the plans for
Minecraft 2
would have already been under way and there would be many expansion kits to get existing customers to pay once more. Instead, completely separate games, such as
Scrolls
, are growing within the walls of the company.

Investors who have been involved in some of Sweden’s and the world’s fastest-growing technology companies are completely baffled by this strategy. But they will only comment anonymously, probably because they are holding onto hopes of realizing future profits on Mojang’s success.

“The cost of every missed opportunity to work with
Minecraft
is enormous,” says one of them. “Every second they invest in something else takes time away from what they could be doing with
Minecraft
.”

Carl’s method for keeping his balance is to innovate around
Minecraft
, that is to say, alongside it, instead of squeezing the game into conventional business logic. Mostly, he hopes for a service that makes it simpler to play
Minecraft
with others online. Starting a server where several
Minecraft
players can meet and build together is notoriously complicated. Inventive businesses have for years offered professionally hosted servers for a fee. Now Mojang wants to do the same. Renting out official
Minecraft
servers would make playing the game easier, but it would also cure Mojang’s big business weakness: customers who pay once and then expect free updates forever. If enough people were to go for it, it would give Mojang a steady source of income without the game’s sanctity being compromised. The sights are set on 50 million players.

It is not easy for Carl to take Mojang in a different direction, and not just because Markus and Jakob own the lion’s share of the company. It was free experimentation that led to the creation of
Minecraft
. Mojang was founded on the view of the game developer as an artist, with all the freedom and quirkiness that entails. That is what made it possible for everyone in that office on Åsögatan to live well on their success, not on business plans or market analyses or a carefully planned PR strategy. Carl knows all this. Perhaps his most difficult task is the balancing act of being CEO for a company that doesn’t really want to be a company. At least, not in the same way as other companies are.

By the end of 2011, Mojang’s influence on the gaming world was undeniable. The Internet was flooded with more or less obvious attempts to copy
Minecraft
’s success. Every word from Markus or one of the others at Mojang was elevated in the press to the status of prophecy. When Epic Games, well known for lavish war games such as
Gears of War
and
Unreal Tournament
, premiered its new title,
Fortnite
, the director of design, Lee Perry, mentioned
Minecraft
as one of their most important sources of inspiration.

But indie? Can you even be indie with over $70 million in the bank?

In winter 2012, Mojang struck a license agreement with Danish LEGO. Shortly thereafter, the first LEGO kits on a
Minecraft
theme popped up in stores. Markus’s desk at Mojang was soon full of gray, green, and brown
Minecraft
LEGO bricks and small plastic LEGO Creepers. Markus, Jakob, Carl, Jens, and the others took part in the marketing campaign, even participating in a small ad that was uploaded onto YouTube.

It’s not hard to imagine how moved Markus was when he held the LEGO pieces in his hand for the first time. No matter whom you ask, LEGO is always among the first things mentioned when the subject of Markus’s childhood comes up. Furthermore, it’s perhaps the clearest source of inspiration behind the game that made him a multimillionaire. But you can also turn that line of reasoning around and consider the LEGO toys as a sign that Mojang was moving in a different direction than its founders had intended. When asked what the most important thing is for his company, Markus always answers that it’s to be able to do “exactly the games we want to.” The goal is definitely not to become a Rovio (a cynical profit machine, in his eyes) instead of a company based on the love of good games.

To any outsider observing Mojang at this time, the difference was not so apparent. Like Rovio, Mojang made almost all its money on a single game, and like
Angry Birds
,
Minecraft
hasn’t changed radically since its birth. Mojang’s proceeds from merchandizing have soared. Via online shops, Mojang was selling T-shirts, posters, toy Creepers, foam-rubber pickaxes, refrigerator magnets—even baby onesies with
Minecraft
prints. In addition, there is talk of plans for Hollywood movies and contracts with several more toymakers. The more money that flowed in, the more obvious it was that
Minecraft
was changing. The game was on its way to becoming something that Markus could no longer control.