Minecraft: The Unlikely Tale of Markus "Notch" Persson and the Game that Changed Everything (5 page)

Jens Bergensten. Art by Ethan Thornton. Photo courtesy of Mojang.

Chapter 6

Macho Men with Big Guns

On the evening
of July 27, 2008, more than fifteen young men sat sequestered in a basement room in Skövde, Sweden, just a stone’s throw from the city’s college. Twenty-eight hours later, they would emerge into the daylight, one summer night poorer, dozens of new computer games richer. The event was called No More Sweden and it was the first of what would become a recurring event in the Swedish gaming world.

In attendance were Jens “Jeb” Bergensten, then mostly known for the strategy game
Harvest: Massive Encounter
, and Nicklas “Nifflas” Nygren, who’d created the popular platform games
Knytt
and
Knytt Stories
, based on the character Knyttet (Toffle, in English) in Tove Jansson’s
Moomin
books. Erik Svedäng, developer of the prizewinning adventure game
Blueberry Garden
and the arcade game
Shot Shot Shoot
for Apple’s iPad was there, and of course Jonatan “Cactus” Söderström, a twenty-six-year-old self-taught programmer from Gothenburg, known to be unbelievably prolific (in just a few years he had developed and self-published more than forty games, with names like
Burn the Trash
;
Shotgun Ninja
;
Clean Asia!
; and
Keyboard Drumset Fucking Werewolf
, an interactive music video for the Gothenburg post–punk rock band Fucking Werewolf Asso). The guys in the basement all belonged to the world of self-financed game developers who have always lived alongside the mainstream industry. In a nutshell, the cream of the Swedish indie game scene had gathered to meet for three days to mingle, swap stories, and create games.

The “cream” is a relative concept. The Swedish indie scene is a narrow subculture kept alive by a small number of enthusiasts. Fifteen people in a basement in Skövde doesn’t sound particularly glamorous, but if someone in the future decides to track down the roots of the Swedish indie game scene, he or she will probably discover a programmer meet-up just like this one.

Twenty-two-year-old Erik Svedäng took the initiative and organized the first No More Sweden. He had been programming games for as long as he could remember, and for several years had wanted to attend the Independent Games Festival in San Francisco. However, it’s hard just to scratch out a living as an independent game developer, and in 2008 Svedäng was forced to accept that, once again, he couldn’t afford plane tickets to San Francisco that year. So he decided to organize his own festival instead. All he needed was a venue; finding enthusiastic game developers to fill it wouldn’t be a problem.

After the programming contest, in which everyone present got twenty-eight hours to create a game, there was an awards ceremony. Svedäng and his friend Petri Purho won in the categories “Most Next-Gen” and “Most Erotic,” with the creation
You Have to Knock the Penis
, a precision game they’ve described as a “feminist statement.” The prize for “Best Game” went to Jonatan “Cactus” Söderström, for
Stench Mechanics
. Since then, No More Sweden has taken place every year, and the number of participants keeps growing.

Both Erik Svedäng and Nicklas Nygren work full-time developing games and selling them on the Internet. In contrast, Jonatan Söderström gives his games away online and lives off donations. By indie standards, they are all successful. They don’t make big money, but all of them agree it’s better than working for a mainstream game company like DICE. Nicklas Nygren feels big game studios lead to creative stagnation.

“Walk into any game shop and look at the boxes. It’s the same thing everywhere, just macho men with big guns shooting at other macho men. It’s all stereotype and a real drag,” he says.

“Of course, there are big productions that break the pattern and do fantastic things, but for the most part, it feels like the whole industry is making games for teenage boys.”

All three identify the freedom to transform their own ideas into reality as their main driving force. Of course, sometimes it’s hard to make ends meet, but in exchange, indie developers have full control over their creations, from the graphics and sound, to design, to game mechanics. You have room to experiment and can complete a product in a relatively short time, without having to listen to the views of other developers or anxious publishing representatives.

“If you have a really clear idea of what you want to do, it’s no fun to compromise. I want to do my own projects, not just work on a small part of a huge game,” says Jonatan Söderström.

Most indie developers agree that interest in small, different, and innovative game concepts is growing. With the right conditions, it’s only a matter of time before more games rooted in the indie scene will reach a larger audience. According to Nicklas Nygren, “As the game industry grew, it left a hole in its wake. During the Nintendo era, there were no megasized development teams and budgets. I believe that many people long for the simpler and more experimental games of that time. That’s what makes indie games work so well today. We fill that void.”

The world of Nicklas Nygren and the rest in that basement in Skövde bears strong resemblances to the origins of the gaming industry, found in the early computer culture of the 1970s and ’80s, and especially in the very popular (at that time) demo scene. A demo is a kind of programmed piece of artwork, combining sound and moving images into a visually impressive demonstration. The purpose of a demo was mainly to showcase a programmer’s coding skills in creating visual effects. Back then, before user-friendly programs made it possible for anyone to create digital animations, such work was complicated and time-consuming.

Demo programmers would often work in inventively named groups, and compete against other groups to try and create the most impressive works. Rival groups would meet up and exhibit their creations at demoparties, a kind of predecessor to today’s gaming and computer festivals. Several Scandinavian groups became famous through demoparties—Hackerence and Dreamhack, in Sweden; The Gathering, in Norway; Assembly, in Finland. These events established networks and began collaborations, giving rise to the largest export giants of the Swedish game industry. DICE has its roots in a demogroup called The Silents; Starbreeze, who developed the acclaimed games
The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay
and
The Darkness
, was formed from the group Triton; and the Finnish group Remedy, known mostly for the
Alan Wake
and
Max Payne
, has its origin in the demogroup Future Crew.

When the very first computer games were being created, development was pretty much all small-scale.
Spacewar!
, released in 1962, is considered one of the world’s first computer games. It was a hobby project for programmers Steve Russell, Martin Graetz, and Wayne Wiitanen working on the PDP-1 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Before Atari mass-produced
Pong
and it became a global success, programmer Allan Alcorn had written the game as a school assignment in 1972. Likewise
Tetris
, perhaps the world’s most famous game, was written by a Russian programmer, Alexey Pajitnov, in his free time, with the help of two colleagues at the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow. Compared to today’s games, these were very modest productions, with simple graphics and mechanics. Putting three hundred game developers to work for several years was unheard of—what in the world would they all do with all that time?

Not until games were packaged and sold in retail shops did the gaming industry in its present form begin to take shape. In the early 1970s, as game consoles made their way into homes, the emerging power structures became even more evident. Printing floppy disks, cassettes, boxes, and manuals was expensive. Producing console games demanded long and complicated copyright agreements with hardware manufacturers. Professional publishers were needed to take care of the paperwork and provide the capital so programmers could concentrate on creating games. And as game consoles became more powerful and games more numerous, developers’ financial resources grew into the budgets of today, often totaling more than $100 million per title.

It’s tempting but incorrect to describe the history of the game industry as a classic David and Goliath saga, with the crass, capitalist corporate interests in one corner and the idealistic indie scene in the other. In reality, the indie scene has always lived in a kind of symbiotic relationship with the established gaming industry, like a creatively brilliant but impossibly unbusinesslike experimental greenhouse. Those who wanted to make game design their career and not just a hobby haven’t had many options to do so, except by applying to work on one of the giant companies’ multimillion-dollar productions. Lately, though, modern forms of distribution have given independent developers new ways to make money.

As is often the case, Apple is a good starting point. In the summer of 2008, the company’s legendary CEO Steve Jobs stood onstage at the company’s main office in Cupertino, California. That morning, he wasn’t presenting a new cell phone or computer. Instead, on the agenda was an update of iPhone’s operating system, with a special focus on developers.

After Jobs demonstrated the telephone’s new security functions and improved e-mail support, it was time for the big news: App Store. Apple was turning the iPhone into a shop. It would be a marketplace where anyone could sell games and applications to millions of iPhone users around the world. To demonstrate the excellence of the new technology, Electronic Arts’ boss Travis Boatman was invited onto the stage. He showed the audience an iPhone-compatible version of the game
Spore
and showered praise on Apple’s invention.

It should be noted that Apple was, in fact, far from first. In typical Steve Jobs style, Apple’s mobile store was more like refining an already established model and applying it to its own market. The idea had come from the game industry, which had taken the first steps toward online sales almost five years earlier. In 2003, Valve, known primarily for the game series
Half-Life
, launched the distribution platform Steam. It soon became the market leader and is today the natural home for PC games distributed over the Internet. In 2004, Microsoft launched the Xbox Live Arcade platform, and in 2006 Sony started its PlayStation Store. Nintendo was last out of the gate, releasing WiiWare in May 2008. When the App Store saw the light of day, all four major game platforms already had digital distribution channels on the market.

Today, Electronic Arts probably feels a little left behind. The company has of course reaped huge success on Apple’s platforms, but the App Store and other digital distribution platforms have proven most advantageous for small-scale, independent game developers. In a telling move, Travis Boatman left the company in 2012 to join Midasplayer-rival Zynga. During the last few years, the portion of digitally sold games has increased greatly, and in 2010 it totaled one fourth of the game industry’s overall turnover. Many of the most popular games are still released by traditional publishers, but the move to digital distribution has also revolutionized the conditions for indie developers. Both Apple and Valve take 30 percent of a game’s sales, and the rest of the money goes directly to the developer. That’s a large piece to pay, it may seem, but keeping 70 percent of the retail price is but a dream for those studios working in accordance with the traditional publishing model. The most important change brought about by digital distribution, it turns out, is not lower costs for the publishers—it’s that the publishers are no longer needed.

Chapter 7

“This Is Way Too Much
Fun. I Built a Bridge.”

For most people,
the colorful numbers and letters that filled the computer screen would be completely baffling, but Markus felt right at home. The game was called
Dwarf Fortress
and it had become a cult favorite in indie circles. Markus had downloaded it to try it out himself and watched, entranced by the simple text world drawn up in front of him.

A couple of weeks had passed since Markus started working at Jalbum and his thoughts were circling full speed around the game he’d promised himself he’d work on. Like when he was a child and would run home from school to his LEGO pieces, he now spent almost all his free time in front of his home computer. He combed the Internet in search of inspiration for his project; the heavy labor—the coding—could begin only after he figured out what kind of game he wanted to create. The idea for
Minecraft
began to take shape in his encounter with
Dwarf Fortress
.

In
Dwarf Fortress
the player is tasked with helping a group of dwarf warriors build a fortress in bedrock. The player controls a group of dwarves that can each be put to various tasks (chopping down trees, mining ore from the mountain, cooking, making furniture, fishing, for example) or made to protect the fortress from monsters such as evil vampires, giant spiders, trolls, and wolves. The basic game mechanics are similar to many other strategy games—
The Sims
, for example, where the player manages a household or the Facebook game
Farmville
, where the objective is to get a farm to flourish. But
Dwarf Fortress
is different from most other games of the genre in a couple of ways.

First of all, the graphics are highly stylized. The
Dwarf Fortress
game world is completely made up of letters, numbers, and other symbols that can be typed on a regular keyboard. In this game, a terrifying giant spider is not a detailed 3-D model but a simple gray letter
S
. Minerals to be mined from the rock are represented by the British pound sign, beds are pale-yellow crosses, grassy meadows and trees are green dots and triangles, and so on. Small, smiling faces of different colors represent the dwarves. Many
Dwarf Fortress
players maintain that the simple graphics make the game more immersive—for what giant spider could possibly be scarier than the one you imagine?—but for beginners it is, to say the least, a deterrent. Just interpreting the information that’s presented on the screen demands a lot of study, and it’s not a wild guess that most people who download
Dwarf Fortress
give up after only a couple of minutes.

But the simple graphics are not there just to scare off all but the most devoted players. They also give the game’s developer time to focus on other things. Great game play and interesting mechanics are always more important than good-looking graphics, maintains
Dwarf Fortress
’s creator, Tarn Adams. It’s also the reason he has spent several years adjusting and tweaking the balance in
Dwarf Fortress
and the nearly infinite number of situations that can arise from the combinations of thousands of different objects, creatures, and occurrences. For the person who takes the time to understand the game’s mysteries, it becomes a world that’s almost got a life of its own. In an interview with the
New York Times
, Adams tells of his surprise when he discovered that the carp he programmed into the game also turned out to be dangerous monsters with an appetite for dwarf warriors:

“We’d written them as carnivorous and roughly the same size as dwarves, so that just happened, and it was great.”

Judging by the popularity of the game—
Dwarf Fortress
has been downloaded more than a million times—many agree.

Secondly,
Dwarf Fortress
is a game that is almost completely open ended. Or rather, the game ends when the player dies, which happens often in the cruel, underground world of dwarves. Other than that, the player decides what to build and how. The game puts a bunch of happy dwarves, tools, and opportunities on the table and waves good-bye with one simple request: have fun. The rest is up to the player.

Markus had quit his secure job at Midasplayer to do just that. Have fun. He loved the indie scene that had sprung up in the gaming world. While it was hard for him to put his finger on exactly what it was that attracted him, he felt at home there, much more so than as a developer with one of the industry’s large, established studios, that much he knew.

His favorite online hangout was the game forum TIGSource, a meeting place for indie developers, where Markus (known as Notch in that context) quickly found a group of friends and acquaintances to talk games with. He loved the burning creativity of the indie scene, its focus on new, interesting gaming concepts rather than on elaborate graphics and expensive manuscripts. He liked that each programmer controlled his own projects entirely.

An outside observer who saw his career at this time would probably shake their head. Markus, who had dreamt of being a game developer since childhood, had had the privilege of working at two of Sweden’s most successful game companies. Avalanche developed Hollywood-like productions, with nearly unlimited budgets. Midasplayer was in the forefront of development and experimented vigorously with the new potential of the web. Still, Markus had hated them both so much that he quit. What was it that rubbed him the wrong way?

Maybe it was more than just getting free of the boss who told him what to do day in and day out. “Indie” literally means independent, that an individual can develop a game without a large company doling out commissions. Markus’s own interpretation of the concept is slightly different. He feels that indie is a matter of self-image. It’s about creating games for their own sake, where the goal isn’t to make money but to make the best game possible.

In many ways, that is a more telling definition. Except for some incredible exceptions, the gaming industry differs from other creative businesses in that the foremost game designers are seldom recognized for their work in the way famous musicians or film directors are. In the gaming world, it’s the publishers or studios that are recognized after a well-received game release, seldom the individuals. That’s because game development is, in most cases, a collective achievement. In a project with several hundred programmers, it’s almost impossible to point out just one person as the brain or the visionary behind the whole thing. In the indie scene, on the other hand, a single programmer can put together a game of his or her own and stand behind everything from the basic vision to the implementation. You could say that the indie scene, being closer to artistry than it is to systems development, has, for the first time, given the individual game developer an identity to embrace. Markus has never thought of himself as a Java programmer, graphic artist, or musician. He sees himself as a game maker, plain and simple. The indie scene was the only place where he could be just that.

While working in web development at Jalbum, Markus resigned himself to the fact that his monthly paycheck wouldn’t be coming from developing games, but it was still better to work on something else during the day in order to be able to invest his evenings and weekends in his own projects. Initially, he had seen Jalbum mostly as his ticket out of Midasplayer. Now, a couple of weeks later, he was actually enjoying it. He had developed a friendly acquaintance with Carl Manneh, the CEO. Markus recalls that his first impression of Manneh was that of a typical businessman, and though Markus wasn’t the least bit interested in business, Carl Manneh’s enthusiasm was impressive. He was young, quick thinking, and had already, at barely thirty years old, run three companies. The first one sold shoelaces, the second was a recording studio in central Stockholm. The third was Jalbum.

And he ran the company really well, in Markus’s opinion. Carl was an entrepreneurial soul with a good head for the business logic of the Internet. Besides that, he understood Markus’s ambition to develop games. He was even interested, asking questions about projects and offering some of his own thoughts. Carl stood for something completely different from what the old bosses at Midasplayer had. He encouraged Markus and made sure that he had the time and the opportunity to balance his job with what he really wanted to do.

Besides
Dwarf Fortress
, there were two other games that fascinated Markus at that time:
RollerCoaster Tycoon
and
Dungeon Keeper
.
RollerCoaster Tycoon
is an amusement-park simulator, where the player builds roller coasters;
Dungeon Keeper
is a strategy game, where the player digs cave passages and populates them with monsters and ingenious traps as protection against plundering explorers.

In
RollerCoaster Tycoon
, Markus liked the ability to build, quickly and easily, original, impressive constructions. He could spend hours dreaming up complicated roller coasters, and he wanted to engender that same creativity in his own project.
Dungeon Keepers
’ contribution had mainly to do with atmosphere. Fantasy-type, torch-lit catacombs are just as much a cliché in the game world as are space battles and dwarf warriors, but it was still an environment that Markus loved. Few games had captured the nerve-tingling sensation of exploring dark, spooky caves and dungeons as well as Bullfrog’s classic strategy game from 1997, in his opinion. From
Dwarf Fortress
, he wanted to bring the exciting feeling of depth and life that Tarn Adams’s cult game was so good at conveying. His own game would feel more like a world to explore and to try to survive in than a narrative, segmented into ready-made challenges.

Then there was
Wurm Online
of course. The similarities between
Minecraft
and the game Markus designed with Rolf Jansson a couple of years earlier are unmistakable. In both, the player has almost complete freedom to alter the world according to his or her own whim. Like
Minecraft
, there are few built-in tasks or challenges to undertake in
Wurm Online
. The player is expected to create his or her own goals for the game alone or, if so desired, in collaboration with others.

In the spring of 2007, Markus dropped out of
Wurm Online
. Rolf had moved from Stockholm to Motala a few years earlier, the two were seeing less of each other, and Markus knew that the big decisions about the game’s development were increasingly in Rolf’s hands. Besides, his Midasplayer job kept him busy.

Rolf was disappointed.
Wurm Online
had just begun to pull in enough money to give him a decent full-time salary. The sudden resignation of one of the game’s founders, the friend with whom he’d worked for more than three years, was a huge blow. Initially, Markus had a bad conscience about it—it was hard not to feel like he had left his old friend in the lurch. He retained a small part of his ownership in the shared company, but turned over the rest to Rolf. A Band-Aid on the sore if nothing else, he thought.

But now, in front of the computer with
Dwarf Fortress
on the screen, Markus’s thoughts were fully focused on the next project—on amusement parks, medieval catacombs, and dwarf warriors, that is to say. All that remained was to put together something new and entertaining.

At first, Markus sketched a game world that was, like many other strategy games, viewed from above. In Markus’s game, the building and exploring would occur in a three-dimensional world a good deal more inviting and easy to understand than that of
Dwarf Fortress
. But the player would still control the action like an omnipotent god with a mouse, rather than seeing the world from the perspective of one’s avatar.

That changed a couple of days later. Like most evenings after work, Markus was on the computer when he stumbled upon an indie game he hadn’t tried before. It was called
Infiniminer
. Markus downloaded the game, installed and clicked it into motion, and then almost fell off his chair. “Oh my God,” he thought. “This is genius.”

Like
Minecraft
,
Infiniminer
involves digging and building. The game is enacted in square, blocky worlds automatically generated before each play. Every individual block can be picked loose from the environment and assembled into something new. Certain blocks, often the ones deep in the ground, contain rare minerals. Others are just dirt and rock to be dug through in the search for treasure.

Recognize it? No surprise there. For anyone who has played
Minecraft
, the first encounter with
Infiniminer
is eerily familiar. The game was developed by American programmer Zachary Barth, and was released in late April 2009, just weeks before
Minecraft
saw the light of day. The two games’ graphics are nearly identical. There are brown dirt blocks, gray stone, and orange, bubbling lava that runs slowly over the ground.

Infiniminer
was originally intended as a multiplayer game, with different teams competing to collect the most precious minerals in the shortest time. Buildings were used as a way of sabotaging the competitors’ progress. But eventually players discovered that building was more fun than competing for points and they began to spend their time creating houses, castles, and other structures instead.
Infiniminer
quickly developed a devoted following, which included Markus, and in the spring of 2009, most signs pointed to Zachary Barth’s game being on its way to a breakthrough. But it didn’t get there, because of a particularly unhappy turn of events.

Barely a month after
Infiniminer
was released, the game’s source code was leaked onto the Internet. This meant that anyone with enough programming skills could make changes to the game, and soon, innumerable downloadable copies and variations of
Infiniminer
began cropping up. For Zachary Barth, the problem was not economic—he had never hoped to make a ton of money from
Infiniminer
—it was that he lost control of how his game developed. Each of the variations of
Infiniminer
circulating on the Internet had small, incompatible differences. Two players with different versions installed could never be sure that they would be able to play with each other. Zachary Barth’s plans of building a large and living multiplayer community around
Infiniminer
became impossible. The American programmer made the best of the situation and released
Infiniminer
as open source code, and gave his blessing to the game’s fans to continue developing it as they wished.