Minecraft: The Unlikely Tale of Markus "Notch" Persson and the Game that Changed Everything (13 page)

Costume contest at MineCon 2011. Photo courtesy of Mojang.

Chapter 15

“You Did It, Markus.
You Really Did It.”

We are approaching
the end of the first day of MineCon in Las Vegas. The stage is still littered with the confetti Markus unleashed when he pulled the lever a couple of hours earlier, symbolically releasing the finished version of
Minecraft
to the public. The five thousand seats in the hall are empty. Now the audience is milling in the room next door, a space just as large but lacking seats. In one corner, the hotel personnel have installed a bar for serving drinks. The bartender picks around among the bottles, looking bored. Most of the participants are much too young to drink alcohol. Besides, they’re already flocking to the stage in one corner of the room for the cosplay contest, the highlight of the weekend for many, where fans dressed as
Minecraft
players compete for prizes.

“Let the squid through!” Lydia Winters shouts into the microphone, and a square person with knee-length arms stumbles forward through the audience. The finalists line up onstage, all dressed as figures from the game. Besides the squid, there is a human TNT-box, a female wolf in a bikini-like outfit, a huge green monster, and a skeleton dressed in a skintight leather suit. The front rows are filled with a hundred costumed fans who’d hoped to be invited up onstage. Most of them are dressed as Steve,
Minecraft
’s main character, each with a stone pick in hand.

Lydia Winters explains the rules to the boisterous audience. Voting will be done by shouting and applause from the crowd, and the contestant they shout the loudest for will be the winner. Lydia is the sole judge. With the patient voice of a kindergarten teacher, she repeats time and again that audience members may only shout and applaud once. She has her hands full with this rowdy bunch, both on and off the stage. On one occasion, the pressure is so great she is forced to ask everyone to take one step back. The scantily dressed wolf, already known as Wolfgirl, wins. If that has something to do with the high percentage of teenage boys in the room, we’ll leave it unsaid. Wolfgirl is beside herself with joy; first prize is a lunch with Markus.

On the other side of the expo floor, between the huge red-eyed black dragon and the photo corner, where fans line up to pose with a six-foot-tall Creeper statue, a group of indie programmers is squeezed in. They are specially invited guests, T-shirt–wearing guys and girls in sneakers and jeans. They have all created games that Markus or someone else at Mojang likes and have been invited to MineCon to show what they’re working on. Throughout the whole conference, they’ve been standing there, fidgeting while the audience pours into the room.

Some of their games are finished; others are not much more than sketchy demonstrations designed around a central idea. One booth displays
Closure
, a black and white puzzle game built by American programmer Tyler Glaiel. In
Closure
, players manipulate light and dark in order to travel through a dreamlike, sketchily drawn shadow world. Another booth offers a hard-to-fathom red-and-blue 3-D world on two side-by-side screens. This is a demo of British developer Terry Cavanagh’s new title,
At a Distance
. The game is completely incomprehensible to a single player, but if two players collaborate and compare what they see on their respective screens, together they can figure out the purpose of the game.

Many who wander by cast curious glances at the creations shown. Some plod onward, most toward the shop to buy
Minecraft
-themed T-shirts, stickers, and paper helmets. Others stop and pick up a controller to try one of the games. They are met with proud smiles from the creators themselves, who guide players through their creations and demonstrate features of which they’re extra proud.

In one corner, we meet James Green and Ken Klopp. They’ve come to MineCon from Seattle to exhibit their game,
AirMech
, the first produced by their company, Carbon Games. The two look like typical computer nerds—James is tall and skinny, with long, straight hair falling over his shoulders, while Ken is round and wears oversized glasses. And in many ways,
AirMech
is the ultimate nerd fantasy.

It’s a postapocalyptic, three-dimensional strategy game, viewed from a bird’s-eye perspective. The player controls an army of tanks and fighter planes that, with the push of a button, can transform into flame-and-bullet-throwing giant robots. The world of
AirMech
is embellished with hand-drawn manga-like graphics and filled with knowing winks to old game classics. The basic setup is borrowed from the cult classic
Herzog Zwei
, released for Sega Mega Drive in 1989. Among the units the player controls in
AirMech
is the
Minecraft
Creeper, a tribute to the hosts of MineCon.

Unlike many other indie developers, James and Ken have a long background in the established game industry. They worked from the mid-1990s for the big-name Ubisoft on large-scale productions such as
Unreal Tournament
,
Splinter Cell
,
Far Cry
, and
King Kong
(based on Peter Jackson’s blockbuster of the same name). In 2008, they moved to Epic Games China. There they developed
Fat Princess
on commission from Sony Computer Entertainment. It was released as a download for PlayStation 3 and unanimously praised by critics.

In spite of their successes, it was a strain to work for a large publisher. The pair was shot down when they proposed developing new features for
Fat Princess
and releasing it on more platforms. Since Sony owned the copyright and the developers didn’t, James and Ken had little say about the decision. Their ideas for future projects were given the cold shoulder. Their ideas weren’t in line with the company’s strategy, they were told. Instead, James and Ken were asked to work on a game engine to run online games for the Chinese market.

That was nowhere close to what the two of them had dreamed of doing. In the summer of 2011, they took their savings and started Carbon Games. There, they would make the games they wanted to and release them for sale on their own, without having to navigate the bureaucracy of a large company.

“It’s amazing. We can talk about the game whenever we want and interact with the players. We decide how
AirMech
will work, what to develop, and when to release it,” says Ken.

Now they’re here in Las Vegas, exhibiting their creation for more than five thousand gamers, all thanks to the Swedish man in the hat whose own game became a worldwide sensation. The significance of
Minecraft
to the indie scene cannot be overstated, James and Ken say in chorus.

“For everyone else on the indie scene,
Minecraft
is a benchmark. It is a signal that shows that it is possible to breakthrough on their own. It does not take a lot of marketing or a large publishing company. Just a really good game that people are talking about,” says James.

Of course, James and Ken are hoping that some of the thousands of people who paid to visit MineCon will also pay to play
AirMech
. It’s mainly due to
Minecraft
that indie developers today even dare to think they might earn decent returns on their games. All the millions of players who bought
Minecraft
through Markus’s homemade website have overcome a mental barrier, is what James Green and Ken Klopp figure. For those millions, buying a game no longer means visiting a store, taking down a cardboard box from a shelf, and paying a cashier. The transaction could just as likely happen on the Internet, buying a game from a completely unknown game developer, after getting a tip on Twitter, Facebook, or YouTube.

“I see
Minecraft
as a sign of the indie scene’s big breakthrough. There has probably never been a better time than now to be game developers,” says James.

Markus is sitting nearby in the same room and his hand is tired. He has written autographs for three hours already, and the line is still several hundred feet long, snaking through the room. Everyone wants Markus’s signature on a T-shirt, backpack, or plastic pickaxe. Before he’s had time to meet them all, his energy is depleted. Disappointed fans watch as he’s led away through the masses by his bodyguard, a middle-aged man with gray hair, white shirt, and a stern countenance—a police officer before he took this job, we’re told.

Maybe such security is needed. When Markus heads for the men’s room, the bodyguard has to push and shove to keep the fans away. The door closes behind Markus so he can do his business in peace, but the mob of fans gathers outside. Soon there are hundreds, most of them brandishing cell-phone cameras in hopes of getting a glimpse of their idol when he emerges. A single expo visitor happens to be inside. He greets Markus politely. Markus hesitates before exiting.

Just over a year ago, Markus had printed and framed the account balance showing his first million kronor in the bank. Then it had felt like proof he hadn’t gone mad, that all his hours in front of the screen had been worth it. Against all odds, his remarkable little game had found an audience.

Now, among the hordes of fans at MineCon, he’s had time to acclimate to his wealth: now a million kronor is the equivalent of one day’s average sales, over $150,000. If he so desired, Markus could spend the rest of his life on a sandy beach drinking cocktails.

In Sweden, that is very rare. But in Silicon Valley, a whole industry has arisen to cater to nouveau-riche entrepreneurs, offering not only to swab the decks of luxury yachts and deliver French vintage wines, but such services as psychological guidance for the suddenly wealthy.

Often, their clients are people who’ve worked at quickly expanding IT companies, with the usual stock options. When the company is sold or goes public, they are transformed overnight from programmers with normal salaries into multimillionaires. Suddenly, they no longer have any reason to go to work. Some of them buy new houses, some get new cars, and some become conflicted about their sudden wealth. At least, that is what San Francisco psychologists Stephen Goldbart and Joan DiFuria claim. They have coined the expression “Sudden Wealth Syndrome.” Armed with the toolbox of psychology, they’ve spent their professional lives guiding people who are suffering from the syndrome. They even founded the Money, Meaning & Choices Institute, a company specializing in psychological guidance for this at-risk group.

There are most likely more crass reasons than altruism for psychologists to want to specialize in therapy for absurdly rich people. Newspaper articles about court cases brought about by sudden wealth were most common around the turn of the millennium, when the value of IT companies was most inflated. When the bubble burst, many psychologists quickly adapted. Those who’d previously offered treatment for Sudden Wealth Syndrome began to focus on its opposite, Sudden Loss of Wealth Syndrome.

It’s easy to write off these psychologists as gold-digging opportunists. But that doesn’t mean it wouldn’t be overwhelming to go from wage earner to multimillionaire in a very short time. Joan DiFuria describes three aspects of the wealth problems in an interview: denial, shock, and finally, and perhaps the most interesting, the feeling of not being worth so much money.

Markus mentions it immediately when the subject of wealth comes up. Throughout his childhood and youth, he saw for himself what it means to have little money. The fights that ensued when he or Anna had caused the family sky-high telephone bills (Markus, because of his constantly used modem, Anna because she talked to friends) are among his strongest memories from childhood. On the other hand, he doesn’t recall thinking of his family as particularly poor. In Salem, there weren’t many rich families to be compared to. But it’s clear that the contrast he now experiences has gotten him thinking. He wrings his hands when he talks about how he feels about his money.

“My job doesn’t actually produce anything for society. I don’t contribute food or anything like that. But I still make a lot more money than those who are truly needed. It is all because I can sell my product on the entire Internet. You can’t do that when you bake bread.”

Markus is very much aware that whether he gets out of bed or not, one day of
Minecraft
’s revenue is equal to what a nurse—like his mother—earns in four years. And yes, it bothers him some.

“I’m not complaining. It just feels a little backwards. I don’t think that there is an evil conspiracy to keep wages down, but people are doing things that really mean something, and they still don’t make any money.”

The concept of financial independence has no strict definition. For some, it means having enough money in the bank to be able to live without using up one’s savings, living on passive income in the form of interest and dividends from investments. Others see it as being rich enough to be able to have a reasonable standard of living for the rest of one’s life. But regardless of how you twist and turn the words,
Minecraft
made Markus financially independent about a year and a half after it was first released. In the autumn of 2010, he’d earned around $7 million. That was before Mojang had acquired an office, a CEO, partners, and employees, so all that money went straight into Markus’s own pocket. By late 2011, his personal fortune had increased tenfold.

There are plenty of stories about sudden riches that end in misery. Especially those about lottery winners who go from being broke to obscenely wealthy in literally one second, like the American mother of three who won $1.3 million a few years ago.

Before she won, she lived in a tiny apartment and worked four jobs in order to feed her family. When the money landed in her account, she bought a house and some new clothes, but she saved most of it. Then everything went wrong. A couple of years later, she told how letters begging for money, demands from relatives, and an obscene number of marriage proposals had completely overwhelmed her. She was threatened and accused by people who had previously been close to her. When CNN interviewed her, she asked the TV channel not to divulge her real name. She had had enough of the side effects of wealth.