After MineCon, Markus took a step back. He took a leave of absence until the end of the year and spent most of it at home playing video games. He felt run-down. He needed time to rest, to be with his wife, and reestablish contact with the friends he’d hardly had time to see during the past six months. But most of all, he needed time to think.
The months before the Las Vegas trip had been insanely hectic. It was out of the question for anyone other than Markus to put the finishing touches on Minecraft, and Markus had worked more or less around the clock to get it ready in time. Interviews, meetings, and the other trappings of success consumed almost all his free time. It wasn’t what he’d imagined a couple of years earlier.
To understand why Minecraft became such a success, you must remember how everything began. When Markus released the earliest version of his game, he considered it an experiment. He wanted to see if he could, on his own, finish a more ambitious project than those he’d worked on before. He wanted to test his ideas and maybe, if he was lucky, make enough money to finance the next game.
It was all about creating games for their own sake and creating new and different experiences. It was not a problem for him that it involved spending long nights in front of the computer with no company. Others often perceive Markus as shy, maybe even introverted—none of which is out of character for skilled programmers. Writing good code, not least for games, demands many long hours.
For those who’ve never programmed, the code may seem a means to an end. But impassioned developers often speak of their handiwork with great affection. It’s fun for them, stimulating, and even peaceful to grapple with abstract problems, the solutions to which are found by placing commands in the right sequence. Being as introverted as Markus, at least during some period of life, may be a prerequisite for truly learning the art of programming. A programmer who doesn’t enjoy sitting all night long in a dark room, eyes glued to the screen, will never become an expert, in the same way that the soccer player who has to force himself onto the pitch will never become a Zlatan Ibrahimović.
Neither is it a coincidence that Minecraft was created outside of the tight framework of the established computer-game industry. At Midasplayer, Markus’s ideas were too odd, and the game he wanted to make had nothing to do with those that had already proven successful. At Avalanche, a programmer couldn’t just drop into the director’s office and suggest a new project. In fact, when we ask his old bosses, they admit without hesitation that Minecraft would never have become a reality inside the walls of their companies. The idea was too strange, too difficult to fit into their existing product catalog. Most of all, it was untried. They would never have dared.
Perhaps Markus’s decision to leave his permanent job in the game industry is the most important aspect of this story. It was only when he resigned himself to the fact that no job with a salary would allow him the freedom to design the games he dreamed of that he was able to quit and create Minecraft. At home in his apartment, no one told him what to do. Of course, he was crazy to say no to a promising career at Midasplayer, but he was crazy in exactly the right way.
The weeks before MineCon in Las Vegas, the world was spinning so fast around Markus that he almost forgot about all of that. His daily life by then had very little in common with the life he dreamed of. He’d never had better circumstances for doing exactly as he pleased, but almost all his time was eaten up by the game he’d worked on virtually nonstop for three years. Great changes were in the works for Minecraft: a subscription model, for example, and better functions for user-generated content. These were ideas that had very little to do with Markus’s original vision. They were afterthoughts, intended to lengthen the lifetime of a game he felt he was essentially finished with. With each passing day, the feeling grew that he was getting stuck in Minecraft.
So he decided to quit.
Markus Persson. Photo by Kristina Sahlén.
Shortly after MineCon, Markus informed the world that Jens Bergensten was taking over as lead developer for Minecraft. Now Jens would have the last word in all decisions while Markus promised to stay in the background. Many people raised their eyebrows when Markus gave his share of Mojang’s profits, $3.5 million, to the employees in early 2012. The decision was sudden. One day, at the office, he gathered his T-shirted colleagues and told them that they were now wealthy men. The money was divided according to how long they had been employed, so Jens received a lesser fortune. But considering the fact that Markus had already made almost twenty times that much on Minecraft, his generosity feels more comprehensible.
Markus could at least put one thing behind him. In March 2012, the court case between ZeniMax and Mojang about who owned the right to the name Scrolls, was definitely over. A settlement gave the creators of Minecraft the right to call their next game Scrolls but not to trademark the title. In addition, Mojang was not allowed to make a sequel to Scrolls using the same name. The agreement is almost identical to the suggestion Markus and others on Mojang’s board of directors had made to ZeniMax almost a year earlier, an offer that had been refused. When Carl received the invoice from his attorneys, he saw that the case had cost Mojang more than $200,000 in legal fees.
Work on Scrolls could continue, but Scrolls was Jakob’s game. No matter how much Markus liked the game, he was not going to interfere in its development. He would have to begin something totally new.
It is no small thing to follow up the most talked-about game of the decade. The pressure on Markus can be compared to a musician who has released an award-winning hit album. Everyone is waiting for something new, and they all have ideas about what is most important. Some emphasize making money, others point to what would be most interesting artistically. Markus knew that the next game could never be as successful as Minecraft. Nothing could garner him as much money or as much attention. Nothing, except possibly an immediate sequel, milking more from the same recipe for success. And that’s exactly what Markus had promised himself he’d never do.
There was only one reasonable way to go. Markus needed to do something really strange. A game so weird that no one could accuse him of selling out or of being a one-hit wonder.
At the time of writing, the first images from what Markus earlier simply called “the space game” had just surfaced on the Internet. It takes place on a spaceship and will contain programmable 16-bit computers. Markus has decided to call it 0X10c—a title difficult to interpret, let alone pronounce, that refers to the year when the game takes place. It’s yet another nightmare for marketers and yet another game that the bosses at a larger company would immediately have waved off as lunacy.
The first few days, Markus sat for hours, sunk deep in code. He lives in a significantly larger apartment now than he did when Minecraft was created. He is married and has more money in the bank than he can spend in the rest of his life. Otherwise, not much has changed. The old school desk that used to house his LEGO pieces followed in the move. His programming stints in front of the computer are just as long as they were in Sollentuna. Minecraft is history, but Markus has found his way back to what he loves.
With a smile, Elin tells us about the Markus she now sees every day at home. He spends most of his time coding. His eyes are shining again, she says. One day, he burst out of his home office. He was exhilarated.
“I’ve done it,” he said, talking quickly, “I’ve sorted out that thing with the shadows.”