Minecraft

The Unlikely Tale of Markus “Notch” Persson and the Game That Changed Everything

Daniel Goldberg

&

Linus Larsson

TRANSLATION BY

JENNIFER HAWKINS

SEVEN STORIES PRESS

NEW YORK • OAKLAND

Copyright © 2011 by Daniel Goldberg and Linus Larsson

English translation copyright © 2013 by Jennifer Hawkins

First english language edition, November 2013

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including mechanical, electronic, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

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Book design by Janet Brusselbach

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Goldberg, Daniel, 1982-

[Minecraft. English]

Minecraft : the unlikely tale of markus “notch” Persson and the game that changed everything / Daniel Goldberg and Linus Larsson ; Translation by Jennifer Hawkins. -- Seven Stories Press First Edition.

pages cm.

Originally published in Swedish as “Minecraft: Block, Pixlar Och Att Gora Sig En Hacka.”

ISBN 978-1-60980-537-1, E-ISBN 978-1-60980-538-8

1. Persson, Markus, 1979- 2. Minecraft (Game) 3. Computer programmers 4. Computer games 5. Computer games--Design I. Larsson, Linus, author. II. Title.

GV1463.G65 2013

794.8--dc23

2013016343

Printed in the United States

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

CONTENTS

CHAPTER 1

THREE, TWO, ONE . . .

CHAPTER 2

FOR BEGINNERS

CHAPTER 3

“DO YOU WANT ME TO FEEL SORRY FOR YOU OR SOMETHING?”

CHAPTER 4

GAMES WORTH BILLIONS

CHAPTER 5

“THEY JUST DON’T GET IT.”

CHAPTER 6

MACHO MEN WITH BIG GUNS

CHAPTER 7

“THIS IS WAY TOO MUCH FUN. I Built a Bridge.”

CHAPTER 8

THE HEDONIC HOT SPOT OF THE BRAIN

CHAPTER 9

“YES, YOU SHOULD PLAY THIS GAME.”

CHAPTER 10

THE SQUID SITUATION

CHAPTER 11

A DILEMMA CONCERNING HOUSE CATS

CHAPTER 12

TOO MANY FOR TWO PIZZAS

CHAPTER 13

MORE THAN A GAME

CHAPTER 14

BECOMING A LEGO

CHAPTER 15

“YOU DID IT, MARKUS. YOU REALLY DID IT.”

CHAPTER 16

BACK TO THE BOYS’ ROOM

PHOTOGRAPHS

SOURCES

LUDOGRAPHY

THANKS

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Chapter 1

Three, Two, One . . .

It’s November 18, 2011. An old man in a faded gray sweater looks up from his slot machine. A long and steady stream of children, teens, and grown-ups flows through the casino. Their outfits are odd, even for this place. In Las Vegas, you can count on seeing pretty much anything: Elvis impersonators lined up on the sidewalks, gigantic fake-gold lions, drunken weekend revelers, and fountains shooting water hundreds of yards into the air synchronized to the tune of the national anthem.

The people streaming through the casino at the Hotel Mandalay Bay are wearing cardboard boxes on their heads. Some are in full cardboard-box bodysuits with armholes that look uncomfortable and make their elbows stick straight out, like cubist comic-strip characters with the posture of bodybuilders. The cardboard suits they’ve squeezed into are painted in large colorful squares, some green, some black. Others are light blue, brown, and pink. The man at the slot machines, clueless, returns to his game, his cigarette, and his morning cocktail.

The cardboard-box people aren’t there to win money. They continue toward the convention facilities that are next to the casino, where in a few minutes they will be cheering as they watch a thirty-two-year-old Swede pull a lever and release the finished version of their favorite game.

Minecraft. A computer game as incomprehensible to the uninitiated as it is wildly adored by tens of millions of people. Those who’ve traveled here are among the game’s most devoted fans. Not only have they paid airfare but also, before embarking for Las Vegas, they cut and glued their suits, modeled on the game’s primitive block graphics and shapes.

And there are thousands of them, representing a total of twenty-three countries. The youngest is four years old and the oldest is seventy-seven. Of the many parents, some have made the trip just for their kids and are now observing in awe a world their offspring adore but that is alien to them. Others are just as passionate as their children.

“We play together constantly,” says a dad with green-tinted hair, wearing a suit sprayed green, his face covered with black bars as he poses for pictures with his identically decked-out son.

A few minutes later. The convention hall where we’re seated is the largest at the Mandalay Bay. It’s completely packed and the lights are off. All eyes turn toward the stage and Lydia Winters, who—impossible not to recognize with her short, shocking pink hair—is firing up the audience.

“This weekend is going to be awesome!”

Giant screens are mounted on both sides of the stage so that those sitting farther back can see what’s happening. They all show Lydia’s happy, glowing, almost cartoon-character-like smile.

“So many people’s . . .  lives have been changed by this game!”

Next to the stage, just to the left, the weekend’s big star is waiting for the signal to step up into the spotlight: Markus Persson, dressed in jeans, well-worn sneakers, and a black polo that’s a bit tight around the middle. As always, he’s wearing a black fedora. Markus doesn’t know what to do with his hands while he waits. He pulls absentmindedly at the hem of his shirt before his hands land in his jeans pockets, thumbs out.

There is an ocean of five thousand people seated before him—if seated is the right word, because many of them stand up as the first of Markus’s colleagues arrive onstage. Lydia Winters calls them up and one by one they trudge onstage, shyly wave a little at the audience, and line up beside her. Jens Bergensten—the programmer, tall, lanky, his red ponytail hanging down his back. Carl Manneh—the CEO, who is perfectly okay with Lydia keeping the microphone. Jakob Porser—Markus’s old friend and the cofounder of his company. The graphics guy, Junkboy—no, his real name is never given in public—who leaps onstage wearing a cardboard box on his head and making victory signs for the audience. They’re all Swedish men, all in their late twenties and early thirties, and they all work at Mojang, the company that produces Minecraft. Most days they sit and work at their computers in a shabby apartment on Åsögatan, in Stockholm. But this is no ordinary day.

This is the moment when the final version of Minecraft will be released to the public. Which means that until today, the five thousand people in the audience—and several million others around the world—have been playing an unfinished game. A kind of prototype, which has earned Markus close to $70 million and created one of the world’s most admired companies.

The Mojang team on stage at MineCon 2011 in Las Vegas. Photo courtesy of Mojang

This is MineCon, the first convention dedicated entirely to Minecraft. The event began as a random idea at the Mojang headquarters on Södermalm, in southern Stockholm. Markus Persson asked on his blog if anyone would pay ninety dollars to go to a Minecraft convention in Las Vegas. Within a few weeks more than 43,000 people said they would, and the Mandalay Bay was booked. The hotel is a forty-four-story monumental monstrosity built entirely of gold-tinted glass. In its twenty-two restaurants, smoke-filled poker dens, and meandering indoor malls, you can easily spend several days without leaving the hotel—exactly as intended. As a rule, casinos in Las Vegas have no windows or clocks, so that gamblers will continue to feed money into the machines throughout the night. The desert gambling mecca is no place for people with regular circadian rhythms.

The coming days will be an unparalleled spectacle, bizarre for those unfamiliar with gaming conventions in general and especially so for those who don’t know Minecraft in particular. People will line up for hours to get Markus’s autograph. A costume contest will nearly degenerate into a riot. Two British men, known by millions of fans from their YouTube channel, will be greeted like celebrities when they play videos on the stage, showing functioning electronic equipment built entirely within Minecraft.

It’s not that surprising. Minecraft had grown into an unprecedented success story well before MineCon. Sixteen million players had downloaded the game; more than four million of them had paid for it. Minecraft had been praised by pretty much every gaming magazine and website in the world. And after all, it’s a game so engrossing that thousands of its most faithful fans have traveled to Las Vegas to celebrate that it is finally finished.

We have come here to understand why. We want to ask the costumed men and women what it is about Minecraft that makes them love it more than any other game. And not least of all, we want to know why Markus’s strange creation has earned him such enormous sums of money.

For it was, of course, the money that made us take note of Markus Persson in the first place. In late 2010, the unassuming programmer began to pop up in interviews, describing how he’d struck gold with his remarkable game. He always displayed a modest, almost surprised demeanor in the face of his success. He didn’t seem to have any idea what to do with his millions.

It looked like an improbable business success, a story of a quick breakthrough and of sudden riches, a shining example of how the Internet can shake the foundations of an industry and create empires within months. But the closer we looked, the more difficult it was to fit Minecraft into the usual frameworks. There was no successful marketing strategy to point to, no business plan that held the secrets to success. There was just one guy with his own, slightly odd idea of what the gaming world needed. The story that emerged had very little to do with polished businessmen and fast deals. Instead, we found an idea rooted in Markus’s childhood, one that could only blossom outside the established framework of the gaming industry.

Actually, it’s only now, seated a few yards from the stage, that we fully understand what a star Markus is. Lydia Winters continues her exuberant introduction as we scan the crowd. There’s a woman crying in the row in front of us, which is reserved for special guests. Her cheeks are pierced and she has henna-colored hair and red scars in intricate patterns on her arms. There is also a short girl holding a camera, beaming with pride. Right beside her, there’s an older Swedish gentleman and a lady with shoulder-length, pure-white hair.

“This all started because of one person,” says Lydia. If anyone had entered the hall at that moment without knowing what was going on, that person would have guessed she was talking about a prophet. The room erupts in cheers.

“I think we need to do better than that. I think we need to chant to get him up onstage.”

The whole audience responds to Lydia’s suggestion. The roar is deafening. “Notch! Notch! Notch!” Few people in the room know him as Markus.

Down beside the stage, thoughts race through Markus’s head. What should he say? He has always hated speaking in public. On Twitter, he writes for half a million people, but this is different. Onstage, there’s no backing up and no erasing what he’s said. It’s all live, going out directly, both to people on-site and to those following the event online.

Forty minutes earlier, he had asked for a drink to calm his nerves. Someone put a glass of vodka in his hand. Now he’s standing there trying to figure out if he’s drunk or not. Shouldn’t he be more nervous? There was something about the stairs too—he shouldn’t look out at the audience when he walks up onstage, someone had said. He might trip.

Markus carefully climbs onto the stage. He looks self-conscious, but breaks out in a timid smile when he holds up his hand to wave to the audience. The spotlights seem to blind him completely. Lydia, whose neon-colored hair is accentuated by her all-black clothing, tries to get a few words out of Markus. He says something about “grateful” and “cool.”

“I love you, Notch!” someone from the audience cries. Markus squirms.

The stage decor consists of paper models and figures resembling those in the game. One life-size human figure looks exactly like Steve, the Minecraft protagonist. There’s a green monster, some boxes, and a column of blocks sporting a lever. The lever’s not actually connected to anything, but the energy level in the room rises when Markus approaches it.

“Are you ready for the official release of Minecraaaaaaaaft?” Lydia roars.

The audience roars back. A techno beat begins to pump. But Markus hesitates, grips the lever, lets it go again. Camera flashes and the noise level in the hall begin to approach the limits of human tolerance. Finally, Markus gives the lever a push. Fireworks explode and confetti shoots out over the sea of faces. The music gets even louder and the programmers onstage break out dancing, as Minecraft 1.0 is finally released to the world. Markus, off to the side, just nods his head to the beat. At that moment, a technician behind the stage tells us, four thousand people are logging in to play Minecraft. Four thousand per second, that is.

Jakob, the old friend from an earlier time, dances up to Markus and receives a hug that lifts him off the floor.

Chapter 2

For Beginners

First-time Minecraft players are usually struck by how simplistic it all looks. Ugly, some would say. But those who know their gaming history will feel instantly at home.

If you look closely enough at a computer or TV screen, you’ll see the dots that make up the image. These points—pixels—are the atoms of computer graphics, the smallest indivisible units. Hardware and software developers harbor a kind of love-hate relationship with the pixel. When Apple released the iPhone 4, Steve Jobs made a big deal about the screen, which he called Retina Display. The idea was that each dot on the screen was so small, the resolution so high, that it would be impossible for the human eye to distinguish between separate pixels, and the last remnants of “computer feel” would vanish. Apple had won the war on the pixel.

In other circles, the pixel is lovingly embraced. Extracting maximum meaning from the fewest pixels is an art form as old as computer gaming. The classic arcade game Pong is just a square dot that bounces between two flat surfaces, but to the player, it’s obviously a game of tennis. In the first version of Super Mario Bros., Mario was only sixteen pixels tall and twelve pixels wide. However, there is no doubt that the little cluster of colored pixels represents a mustachioed Italian plumber wearing a red cap and suspenders.

Today, the limitations of hardware are no longer a problem, but the logic of the pixel continues to affect the gaming world. Place four pixels in a square and you get a block; pile the blocks on top of each other and you get a tower; arrange them diagonally and you have stairs. The worlds in the Super Mario games are still built of blocks, placed side by side to create platforms to stand on, or on top of each other to create walls. Certain blocks can be destroyed, but new blocks can’t be created. And the whole point of Tetris is to eliminate blocks by arranging them in rows as they fall slowly down the screen.

The breakthroughs in 3-D graphics did not mean that the blocks disappeared. Instead, the two-dimensional squares became boxes. Block puzzles, in which objects are moved around to fit into predetermined patterns, popped up in all imaginable kinds of games, kind of like homages to the early days of video games when everything was blocky, charmingly clumsy, and square out of pure necessity. But boxes and blocks also lend themselves to building games—we have all played with blocks as kids, piled them on top of each other, toppled them, and arranged them side by side to make patterns.

Minecraft embraces the pixel. The ground, trees, mountains—and everything else in Markus’s creation—are built of identically sized, one cubic meter blocks. Colors vary, depending on what the different blocks represent. Grass blocks are green on the top and brown farther down; mountain blocks are gray; tree trunks are brown (except for birches, which are black-and-white, as in reality).

But then, this is no paltry little toy world that the player finds himself or herself in, after having seemingly fallen out of the sky for no apparent reason. Huge green spaces stretch out in one direction, a gigantic ocean in the other, and in the distance—how far you can see depends on how powerful your computer is—you glimpse a cloud-covered mountaintop. Amid the trees and quadrangular pigs, cows, and sheep scampering idly around is the player, represented by the blocky avatar, Steve. There is no given direction to move in, no obstacles to climb over nor enemies to defeat. The player receives no instructions whatsoever. Exactly how the world looks changes every time, as the scenery is randomly generated before each new game. The code that generates these worlds is, to say the least, complicated, for while chance determines the appearance of the world, there always has to be natural transitions between mountains, steppes, water, and caves. Markus is the only one who really understands how it all works.

This is where some people stop playing Minecraft. Others, however, begin to dig, because every single block in the Minecraft world can be hacked free from the environment and rearranged in a new formation of the player’s design. Put enough blocks in the right places and you have a simple shelter; a few more will turn that shelter into a house—or a barn, a fort, a spaceship, or an exact replica of the Reichstag building in Berlin. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Most people are content with building a simple shelter at first, and in fact, they have to. Because after ten minutes the sun goes down and Minecraft day transitions into Minecraft night, and at night monsters come out. By that time, it’s important to have used enough dirt clods or stones to build something that they can’t get into. A player’s first shelter isn’t usually very impressive, but it only has to be good enough to protect you from the skeletons, spiders, and zombies that wander the dark. Not to mention the most infamous Minecraft monster of all: the Creeper.

The Creeper is a creature known by its green blockish shape and characteristic black pixel face. When a Creeper approaches the player, it starts to hiss like a lit fuse on a stick of cartoon dynamite; then it grows, blinks white, and finally explodes, taking the player down with it. In October 2010, Markus Persson announced on Twitter that the Creeper is “crunchy, like dry leaves,” and even though such qualities cannot possibly emerge in the low-resolution game world, this description has since become an uncontested part of Minecraft lore.

The story of how the Creeper came to be is emblematic of how Minecraft was developed. Markus has apologized for the game’s simple (though according to many, ingenious) graphics by saying that he just wasn’t able to create anything more sophisticated at the time, but the Creeper really takes limited invention to a new level—it was made by mistake. While trying to design a pig, Markus mixed up the variables for height and length and the result was a standing form with four smaller blocks for legs. With a little greenish tint and a ghostly face, the monster was complete. Today, the Creeper has been immortalized on T-shirts, in the Minecraft logo, on decals, and with innumerable homemade costumes.

Minecraft does offer the player a lot of conventional gaming recreation. You can, for example, build portals to parallel dimensions, explore abandoned ruins, fight with a sword, and face dragons in life-and-death battles. But the players who focus on these things are missing the point: Minecraft is about building. After building the first shelter, to protect from the monsters of the night, a deeply rooted human need sets in—the need to build new things, to construct something more advanced, or to just create nicer surroundings. It’s even possible to play in a mode where monsters don’t come out and attack at night and where the supply of resources—sorry, blocks—is infinite. It’s called Creative Mode.

When those who enter Markus Persson’s world do so without interfering enemies and can invest all their energy in building, their creativity takes off. Placing one block upon another, over and over, can yield the most spectacular creations. The largest ones are created by several players working together for weeks, maybe even months. As listing all of the impressive feats of construction would demand a book of its own, we’ll settle for a small sample:

THE EIFFEL TOWER. Actually, many versions of Paris’s iconic landmark have been constructed. Some builders, who kept the height down to around 30 meters, have publicly apologized for their lack of ambition and promised that future buildings will be more true to life.

THE STARSHIP ENTERPRISE, the giant spaceship from Star Trek, re-created block by block in as elaborate detail as the one-meter cubes will allow.

NOTRE DAME CATHEDRAL, in full scale. The originator proudly declared that the cathedral was created in Survival Mode, with monsters lurking at night.

AN ELECTRIC ORGAN, fully functional and with several voices, playing Johann Sebastian Bach’s Air on the G String.

THE TAJ MAHAL, in several versions.

THE PLANET EARTH. Not full scale, but big enough to astound anyone who appreciates how time-consuming it is to build anything out of cubic meter blocks.

And this is still just the beginning. Of the many building materials to be found in the world of Minecraft, there is one known for its conductivity: redstone. These blocks are best regarded as a basic programming language, and can be used to build electronic equipment. A player piano, a slot machine, or a fully functional calculator, for example. Or why not a version of Minecraft, played on a computer built inside of Minecraft? Perhaps this is why Minecraft is so unique: the most devoted players choose to exclude everything in it that is reminiscent of more conventional games; they don’t care about killing enemies, exploring caves, or slaying dragons. They only want to build. Bigger, more beautiful, more complicated, and more impressive.

That doesn’t make Minecraft less of a game, just a very different game. There’s nothing here that can be called a climax; there’s not even any real rules or challenges to get past. Minecraft can be thought of as an enormous sandbox where imagination reigns. The purpose of the game becomes whatever the player decides to create: an even more detailed Taj Mahal, a copy of the Royal Palace in Stockholm, an electric organ with more voices than anyone else has succeeded in putting together, or maybe just a little red cabin with white trim. The game can be made just as simple—or complex—as the player wishes it to be.

So, if Minecraft isn’t a game in the usual sense of the word, what is it? Maybe it can be thought of as LEGO pieces on steroids; LEGO pieces that you can build larger and more advanced buildings with. LEGO pieces are, of course, sold in kits, intended to be put together according to predetermined designs. But it usually doesn’t take long before all the pieces are mixed up. True creativity isn’t unleashed until they’re lying all over the place.

In Minecraft, no particular block has any predetermined place in a construction. A black block can be part of the nose of a giant Mickey Mouse statue, included in a ballroom floor, or become part of the foundation of the Great Pyramid of Giza. Just like LEGO pieces, Minecraft gives the player infinite freedom to create, while the potential is strictly set by the characteristics of the raw materials. A block is always a block, but enough blocks can become anything the player can imagine.

When Markus Persson pulled the lever on the stage in Las Vegas, Minecraft was already a world sensation. In the spring of 2012, his game had more than three times as many players as the population of Sweden. Just a few years before that it was far from obvious that he would become known outside the small circle of initiates who understand and appreciate obscure independent games.

Many games have been sold in larger numbers than Minecraft—most notably, those released by the large game companies, with their thousands of employees and billions of dollars in annual turnover. Those games are pressed onto the market with worldwide advertising campaigns to shore them up. They’re always sold in boxes on retail-store shelves, like any product, and cost many weeks’ allowances. The themes are, of course, just as magnificent as they are deadly serious: war with automatic weapons, battlefields in fantasy environments, and interactive space sagas for science fiction buffs. These games are polished and photorealistic down to the last detail, and have well-paid Hollywood actors doing the voiceovers. Games that sell will have sequels. Games that do well after that may be turned into franchises. And so on, until every possible dollar has been sucked from the original concept.

And then we have Minecraft: a game developed by one single person in Stockholm, with graphics so pixely simple that it makes you think of the 1980s. An idea that, if it had been proposed to an investor, would have been immediately sent to the circular file, but that, against all odds, became perhaps the most iconic and talked-about game since Tetris. To understand how it all began, we need to go to Sweden, to an apartment in a suburb of Stockholm, and to a time when nothing looked like it was moving in the right direction for Markus Persson.

Chapter 3

“Do You Want Me to Feel Sorry for You or Something?”

The same scenario greeted Ritva Persson each evening. She’d finished her nursing shift, gone home to the apartment, and walked in the door to the sound of Markus’s keyboard clattering in his room. High school was over, but her son showed no signs of moving out. He showed very few signs of anything at all, in fact. Often, when Ritva returned from a full day at work, Markus had been sitting at his computer the whole time. His hours spent in front of the screen were divided between playing simple, nerdy games and programming his own, just-as-simple, just-as-nerdy games. Even though his creations were nothing extraordinary, Markus liked watching them materialize before his eyes. When he was absorbed in his code, nothing else around him mattered. It would be a gross exaggeration to say that Markus had a life plan, but if there was one thing he was sure of, it was that he liked creating games. His dream was to make a career of it, and ideally, those games would be his own.

That Markus was shy was no news. Ever since his family had moved from the small town of Edsbyn to the city of Stockholm, he had preferred to keep to himself. Life in the small town had been different. His family moved there when Markus was a newborn, bought some land, and then built a house while Ritva was pregnant with Markus’s little sister, Anna. Markus’s father, Birger, got a job at the national railroad company, and Ritva commuted to the hospital in Bollnäs. Even then Markus loved building with LEGO pieces, but in Edsbyn he also played with the neighboring kids. He was kind of the tough guy in his little group, the one who came up with the pranks that the others went along with.

Markus remembers how he changed after the move to Stockholm. When he started at the Skogsängs School in Salem, he was put in a class with kids who had already had six months to get to know each other, and it took a while for Markus to fit in. He spent every day alone with his LEGO pieces, which he stored unsorted in an old school desk (the wooden kind, with a flip-up lid). Sometimes, he’d turn the pieces into spaceships and then dismantle them; other times he built a car—just to see if it would survive the trip down a small incline that Markus had chosen for exactly that purpose. If the car made it all the way down, it was branded a success and he would take it apart and use the pieces for something new. Every year as Christmas approached, more LEGO pieces were at the top of his list.

Markus’s interest was diverted only when his father came home one day from work carrying a large box in his arms. Proudly, Birger opened it in front of the family and lifted out a Commodore 128, the more advanced sibling of the iconic gaming computer, Commodore 64. The family set up the machine in the parents’ bedroom and it immediately became, as far as Markus was concerned, the focal point of the home. Some simple games came along with the new computer, but even more interesting to seven-year-old Markus was the programming instructions, which he read through with Birger guiding him. They sat together in front of the monitor every evening, and it was his dad whom Markus called over to come see the end results of his early exercises in programming.

The computer opened up a new world to Markus. Just as building with LEGO pieces was more fun than playing with ready-made cars and spaceships, there was something special about entering code in the machine and getting it to perform. Markus’s first original games were text adventures based on a cowboys-and-Indians theme. Perhaps the simplest form of game, a text adventure is more like an interactive novel where the player engages through text than what we’ve come to expect from computer games. For example, the player may be put in front of a house and must choose, by typing a command, between entering through the door, breaking the window, or turning around. Depending on which option he or she chooses, the story unfolds in different ways. The biggest flaw in Markus’s creation was that he didn’t know how to save the code, and so each time the computer was shut down, everything disappeared and the next day he would have to begin all over again. Maybe you need the tenacity of a seven-year-old to continue under such circumstances.

Whenever Markus wasn’t doing his own programming, he was playing games. The classic puzzle game Boulder Dash, in which the player’s mission is to dig around in caves, watch out for enemies, and collect valuable gemstones for points, was a favorite of his. He also played the action game Saboteur, and the role-playing game The Bard’s Tale (the first game he bought with his own money). As they all were in those days, the games were simplistic creations with pixely graphics and squeaky, hissing digital sounds for music. Markus could sit for hours in front of the computer with his trusty plastic joystick in his grip and his cassette player spinning in the background.

Markus had no trouble with any of his classes. In fact, school was so easy that he started trying to stay home. It wasn’t like he was cutting classes; Ritva remembers how he’d tell her he had a stomachache or some other vague symptom just serious enough for him to be able to stay home and slip into his parents’ bedroom and to the computer.

When Ritva’s days off from work coincided with Markus’s “sick” days, she became worried by how engrossed Markus was in the computer. It was the 1980s, the debates about video violence raged on, and something as new as computers—in homes, no less!—was depicted as dangerous for your eyes and your child’s development. He should get out more, she thought. Play soccer, be with the other kids. She wanted to see him come home with rosy cheeks, exhausted from an afternoon of fresh air, not sunk down in front of the computer like a sack of potatoes. She considered limiting his time at the computer, but soon realized it would be like trying to stop an avalanche with her bare hands.

Instead, she tried subterfuge. When Markus wasn’t at home, she snuck into his room and put up posters of soccer players—no one remembers which—that Markus immediately tore down with a caustic comment that no one else should try to decide what he would have on his walls. Ritva even dragged Markus to the local soccer club. After he had stumbled around the field, missed the balls, and avoided scoring, the coach took Ritva aside. “Nothing will probably come of this,” she remembers him saying. “He’s not going to be a soccer player.”

Ritva was successful, however, in getting both Markus and Anna to go to church. Though Markus seldom talks about growing up in a religious, evangelical family, his parents had actually met each other through the Pentecostal movement. Virtually every Sunday, the family took the commuter train into the city, got off at the T-Centralen subway station, and walked to the City Church in the center of the city. Markus mostly remembers the services as boring. But he did believe in God.

Eventually, Markus found a small group of friends at school who also had particular interests. One showed a great musical talent; another was, like Markus, more interested in technology and logical constructions. Everyone in his small circle got good grades and each had a single passion in life. They were, if we may use a tired expression, nerds. At some point in middle school, they added tabletop role-playing games to their list of activities, which got Markus to reveal a new side of his personality. In every other context he preferred to take the backseat, but when it came to creating fantasy worlds, with dragons and elves, he suddenly wanted a central role, to be the game master, the one who made up the stories with monsters and set the challenges for the other players. The boy who usually sat by himself now wanted to join in and have a say, but only about a world that existed in his and the other players’ imaginations.

When Markus and his sister were around twelve and eleven, their parents divorced and their father moved out. The house became too big and expensive, so Ritva and the kids moved into an apartment. Contact with their father grew increasingly rare. The divorce was a blow to the entire family, but it really hit Markus’s sister hard.

It began as innocent teenage rebellion. Anna found new friends. She began to comb her hair into a huge Mohawk. Then, one by one, she added the classic punk attributes to her look: the studded black leather jacket, the piercings, the black eye makeup. Some days, she painted sharp arrows out toward her temples. She showed up less and less often at school and at home, the fights were getting violent. Both Markus and his sister remember the time she kicked in a door at the apartment. One time Anna, who knew her brother’s sensitive spot, screamed something at him about being a computer nerd, and Markus retaliated by calling her a “punk whore.”

“I tried to intervene. I thought, If I get through this with a sound mind, I’ll be lucky,” says Ritva today.

One day, Markus found evidence that Anna’s rebellion had taken a more serious turn. He had snuck into her room, which was something of another world for him. There lay the leather jacket, green hair spray, and records with music and lyrics no parent could understand. On one of the walls, a British flag hung askew. An old teddy bear dangled from the ceiling, a noose around its neck. And in the unmade bed, there lay a badly hidden can with a small spout and a label that said “Butane.” Meant for refilling cigarette lighters, butane was known among teenagers as an easy-to-get and quick-acting intoxicant, if inhaled.

Markus was floored. Not so much because the can was proof that his sister used drugs (he was a teenager, after all, so drugs weren’t a complete mystery to him) but rather by her choice of intoxicant. At school the talk was of weekend binges, but nothing he’d heard about huffing lighter fluid made it sound very enticing. Apparently the effect was about the same as you’d get from holding your breath for a very long time, but much more damaging. It just didn’t sound like very much fun. Using this particular drug was, in his opinion, stupid and pointless, and he tried to make that clear to her.

It didn’t work out as well as he’d hoped. Anna screamed, defended herself, and accused Markus of going through her stuff. She stiffly denied the butane was hers, or at least that she huffed it. Of course, Anna had been out of control for a while by then. Ritva had disapproved of the black, studded clothes and the punk rock. And then her daughter’s interest in piercing had developed into a fascination with scarification, a form of tattoo where patterns are cut rather than inked into one’s skin. But the butane was different. Ritva then knew she was losing her grip on the situation, and so she turned to social services for professional intervention.

Markus handled the chaos in his usual manner: he isolated himself. People who were close to the family can’t really remember a time when Markus was seen doing anything other than sitting in front of the computer. Even today, he speaks of the computer, of code and the world of programming, as a sanctuary, a quiet place where he can be alone with his thoughts.

In order to better understand Anna’s behavior, we need to tell her father’s story. Birger was an addict. The drugs—mostly amphetamines—had been a part of Birger’s life before the kids were born, but he stayed clean during their childhood. After Birger and Ritva’s separation, however, it wasn’t long before Birger went back to his old habits. Shortly after that, he left Stockholm and went to live in a small cabin out in the country, a long train trip away from his children.

Birger became increasingly isolated from the rest of the family. Ritva did her best to avoid all contact with him. One day, the family received news that he’d been arrested. He’d been involved in some kind of break-in, they were informed. Birger was sent to prison.

Today, no one in the family really remembers a trial or any specific charges; they had cut all ties with Birger. Even Markus “shut it out,” as he puts it. Much later, after the prison sentence, Markus received a telephone call. He heard his dad through the receiver telling him that he was free.

“Well,” Markus answered, “do you want me to feel sorry for you or something?”

Services at the City Church were beginning to feel less relevant to a teenage Markus. It was no longer so obvious to him that there was a god watching over him. The revelation didn’t come through introspection or soul-searching, but through the rationale of a programmer who contemplates what is reasonable to believe in. Markus didn’t lose his faith; he replaced it with logic.

Just before beginning high school, Markus, like all Swedish students, went to see the school’s guidance counselor. Inside the office, he said he knew exactly what he wanted to do in life: program computer games. Few of his teenage classmates had such a clear ambition; hardly anyone else got their dreams so effectively crushed, either. Make games? Like, as a job? The guidance counselor took it as a joke and recommended the media program because, he told Markus, it had a branch that, unlike computer games, offered a bright future: print media. Dejected, Markus accepted the offer and left. Media at Tumba High School was what he got.

The school did have one major upside. Even though the courses smelled more of printing ink and thick sheets of paper than the digital world Markus loved, there was an elective in programming. Markus went to a total of two classes. During the first one, he ignored the teacher’s instructions and instead programmed his own version of Pong. The teacher took one look over Markus’s shoulder and made a quick decision.

“Just come back to the last class and take the test,” he said.

Markus got an A.

During the summer between his first and second years at high school, the fights at home got so bad that Anna moved out. His sister describes her following years as a complete chaos of drugs and self-destructive behavior. From the huffing she’d moved on to heavy drinking. Then she tried amphetamines, the same drug her father was hooked on. Anna became the sole member of the family to maintain any contact with papa Birger during the years he was using. She tells us today how they began to take drugs together and how she became more of a dope buddy than a daughter to him. Markus stayed in touch with his sister throughout this period, but could only look on as she fell deeper into dependency.

Markus and Ritva were now alone in the apartment. Markus had graduated from high school in Stockholm in the late 1990s, when the dot-com bubble was at its greatest and pretty much any teenager with basic computer skills could get a job at a hyped-up web agency with fancy offices. Markus’s problem was not that he didn’t understand his opportunities, but that he was all too aware of them. He tried working at a web agency for a short time, but thought the programming tasks were boring, so he quit. There were always other jobs out there, he figured. And there were, until the first signs that the expected giant profits from the new generation of IT companies would never materialize, and the bubble burst.

Suddenly, being a gifted, slightly introverted teenager with mounds of programming knowledge but no formal education wasn’t such a promising position to be in. But then, Markus had never wanted to be a run-of-the-mill programmer at a run-of-the-mill company. He wanted to make games.

“I’m going to get rich,” his sister remembers him saying once. “And then I’ll take you on a helicopter ride.”

But he had no plan to make it happen.

An unemployed Markus started to feel quite comfortable living at home with his mom. With both his dad and sister gone, there was plenty of room, and the place was quiet enough for him to sit undisturbed at his computer.

Ritva remembers him saying once, “Mom, I’m going to live with you my whole life.” She could see how the years would pass without Markus getting either a job or an apartment. Oh, my God, what a nightmare, she thought. But she just smiled, and her son shuffled back into his room and sat down in front of the computer.

Ritva didn’t try to throw Markus out, but she did try to at least get him out of the house during the day. Every day, she opened the free newspaper, Metro, and carefully read through the ads for courses. When she saw one that was for programming, she signed him up without asking him if he was interested. After a few failed attempts, she finally got Markus to go to a short course on the programming language C++.

Markus also continued working on his own games, and he’d come a long way since his first attempts with text adventures. He had become a skilled amateur coder, experimenting with small, simple games that tested new, original ideas. Markus started competing in game-development contests, where the goal was to develop a game in a short time using the least amount of code possible. It forced him to think economically—just the kind of fast-paced programming he liked so much. The aim was not to make money, and he didn’t. It was more about getting attention and recognition from other amateur developers.

Luckily enough, the IT industry soon began to rise from the ruins of the crash. Markus took an opportunity to work at the fringes of the gaming industry, at a company called Gamefederation. It was not a game-developing company—Gamefederation worked with systems for game distribution. But now and then, Markus would get the chance to create small game prototypes in order to test a system’s functions. These creations haven’t been saved for posterity, but for the first time Markus was getting paid for something that at least resembled game programming, and that, he liked.

When Markus was hired at Gamefederation, another developer, Rolf Jansson, had already started working there. Rolf quickly became Markus’s closest colleague, despite their drastically different backgrounds. Unlike Markus, Rolf already had substantial work experience. Before ending up at Gamefederation with Markus, he had been a consultant at IBM—a dream job for many. The pay had been great and, being a successful employee of one of the world’s largest IT companies, his future would have been secure. Nevertheless, Rolf, just like Markus, dreamed of working with games.

Rolf remembers Markus as being shy and quiet, but a nice guy. It was when the two of them began talking about games that Markus lit up, and they had a lot to talk about. Markus got Rolf to play Counter-Strike, and Rolf showed Markus his favorite games. Soon, the two of them began staying late after work, playing multiplayer games on the company’s network. Sometimes they sacrificed a lunch and went over to The Science Fiction Bookstore, in Stockholm’s Gamla stan (the Old Town), where they bought cards for Magic: The Gathering. Between game sessions, they would talk at length about what was missing from the games available on the market, and together they could envision the perfect game and figure out what it was that the next hit game needed.

Markus stayed at Gamefederation for four years. He then got the chance to enter the game industry for real when he interviewed for a then-unknown company, Midasplayer. The little he’d heard about it was promising. At Midasplayer, each developer was responsible for his or her own games. On top of that, Markus liked that the company focused on making small games to be played online. It sounded like what he’d been doing on his own for years without earning a cent. Everything seemed to be falling into place; they just needed to hire him.

Chapter 4

Games Worth Billions

“Do you know ActionScript?”

The job interview at Midasplayer began really badly. Markus couldn’t dodge such a direct question, and the only honest answer was a straight no. He had experimented with most existing programming languages used to create small online games, but not ActionScript. Unfortunately, that was the only one used at the company where he wanted to work.

Markus got the job anyway, an indication of how quickly Midasplayer was growing at the time. Each day, the line of commuters from the subway station to Midasplayer’s main office on Kungsholms Square in Stockholm grew longer. The year was 2004 and the company was just a year old.

Markus had to spend his first week at his new job learning ActionScript before he could begin working on his own projects. He mostly sat quietly staring into his screen, partly because he was focused, and partly because he had quickly noticed that the powers that be at his place of work were nothing like him. He began, for the first time, to glimpse the contours of a gaming world quite different from what he had dreamt of since childhood.

To understand how he felt, you need to lift your gaze a bit and look more closely at the professional gaming industry. In Stockholm, one company exemplifies the Goliaths of that world better than anything else.

On the other side of the inner city from Midasplayer’s offices are the headquarters of the game studio DICE. On dark evenings, boats entering Stockholm from the south are greeted by a brightly lit neon sign displaying the company’s logo, high up on the glass facade of the building next to the Slussen locks. At that exclusive address, nine floors above the street, some of Sweden’s most successful export items have been created. From inside the offices you can view Gamla stan and the sea approach to Stockholm through panoramic windows.

DICE is owned by Electronic Arts, one the largest video game publishers in the world. Daily life there is markedly different from the amateur programming that Markus was used to. The company’s games are products, adapted to target audiences down to the smallest detail, backed by billions of dollars in marketing, and delivered with elaborate planning in order to boost the parent company’s quarterly profits and stock market value. DICE’s cash cow is the game series Battlefield, a realistic, tactical war simulator that has sold over 50 million copies. The first part in the series, Battlefield 1942, was released in 2002. Since then, DICE has honed and tweaked the concept in sixteen different sequels, with wars being alternately staged in Vietnam, the Europe of WWII, and a fictional future conflict between the United States and Russia.

In late 2011, the company was gearing up to launch its latest title in the series: Battlefield 3. The release would be an internationally acclaimed event in the gaming world, as elaborate as a major Hollywood premiere, coordinated by an international team of marketers and PR experts. For several months, expectations were raised with ad campaigns and articles in gaming magazines. Particular emphasis was put on the game’s new, completely redesigned engine, which allowed DICE to create a more realistic war experience than ever before. “All the sights, sounds, and action of real-world incursions,” the ads bragged. In trailers, backed by grinding heavy-metal guitars, virtually photorealistic soldiers could be seen rushing around through urban environments that were promptly shot to pieces.

At the same time, the stock market was massaged with gilt-edged information about the new game. Electronic Arts’ well-dressed CEO, John Riccitiello, spoke often and inspirationally about how Battlefield 3 would push up Electronic Arts’ market value. The competition was Call of Duty, a war game from archrival Activision Blizzard.

“Call of Duty did 400 million dollars in revenue on day one. Battlefield 3 is designed to take that game down,” John Riccitiello told the audience at the Ad Age conference in New York.

Battlefield 3 was released simultaneously in tens of thousands of game shops the world over. Many of the most devoted fans stood in line for hours, and several stores stayed open for midnight launches. In preparation for the premiere at the Webhallen video game store in Stockholm, extras dressed as soldiers entertained the waiting crowd with fights and staged robbery attempts. DICE employees celebrated the release by renting out one of Stockholm’s oldest and finest restaurant-nightclubs and throwing a giant party, where they toasted each other with champagne while the pop star September entertained them.

During its first week in stores, Battlefield 3 sold more than 5 million copies. The financial people at Electronic Arts established that the game had added about $370,000 to the company’s coffers—significantly more money than Avatar, one of the most lucrative films ever, earned during its first weekend in the theaters. For the uninitiated, the numbers may seem sky-high, but they were exactly in line with what the bosses at Electronic Arts had predicted. Battlefield 3 was just more proof that computer games are big business.

In 2010, computer games were sold to the tune of $46.7 billion. That’s more than double the total amount of music sold, $16.4 billion. If you believe the industry’s own statistics, the consumer demographics are a far cry from the usual picture of gamers as mainly young men and boys. Four out of ten players in the United States are women. Three out of ten are over fifty years old, and only one out of ten is a boy under seventeen years old. Today, gaming is one of the world’s largest, most appreciated, and most demographically widespread forms of entertainment.

The CEO at DICE at the time of Battlefield 3’s release was Karl-Magnus Troedsson. For over twenty years, his career has run parallel to the development of the Swedish gaming industry. In the late 1990s, right after completing his studies at the college in Gävle, he was hired by the game company Unique Development Studios (UDS). The first game he worked on was Mall Maniacs, an advertising game developed for a Swedish grocery store chain and McDonald’s, in which the player’s task was to fill a shopping cart with advertised items as fast as possible. A couple of years later, he began working at Digital Illusions, which later became DICE. Sweden, particularly the Stockholm region, had by then established itself as one of Europe’s most prominent centers of game development. Today, Swedish games pull in almost $1.4 billion in yearly sales for the large companies. A big chunk of that money goes to DICE.

Today, the situation is very different from the experimental workshops of the early years. Karl Magnus Troedsson calls it “mature” and “more professional.” Others would probably use words like cold and unforgiving. Enormous sums of money are invested in each game that actually makes it to market, and the demands on a successful studio like DICE are immense. New games have to place either first, second, or third on the ranking lists. Anything less is considered a flop.

The largest games publishers, such as Electronic Arts, are listed on the stock exchange and run, like other huge companies, according to quarterly reports and the expectations of the market. They navigate using Excel spreadsheets full of sales prognoses and cost analyses. Publishers like Electronic Arts are the most powerful in the video game industry. They finance the game developers’ projects and decide whether or not a game will get produced. They also control the enormous budgets needed to market a popular game—a general rule is that just as much money is spent on advertising and marketing as on the programming itself and, in extreme cases, such as that of Battlefield 3, several times more. And it’s the publishers alone who have access to the distribution and production contacts that are needed to press millions of CD or DVD disks and then ship them to stores throughout the world. The five largest game publishers—Nintendo, Sony, Microsoft, Activision Blizzard, and Electronic Arts—accounted for about 70 percent of the turnover in the industry in 2008.

The enormous budgets and gruesome deadlines that mark large productions engender predictability and standardization. That doesn’t necessarily mean bad quality. For example, Battlefield 3 has been praised as one of the most impressive games of 2011. There is, however, less room to test new ideas. For a nonplayer, there is very little that separates Battlefield 1942—the first edition of DICE’s series, released in 2002—from the latest version. Huge productions tend, like giant Hollywood films, to build upon proven concepts that appeal to as large an audience as possible. Sports games, which can be updated each year to reflect the latest season’s player lineups, are among the most profitable in the business and are produced assembly-line style by the big publishers.

From the point of view of publishers, experimental game concepts are risky. Why try something different when another Battlefield with better graphics and even more impressive explosions is almost guaranteed to sell at least as well as its predecessor? New ideas mean untested ground and therefore greater risk that the investment won’t pay off. Only a fraction of the thousands of game productions that are initiated each year ever reach the top of the sales-ranking lists. Though it’s the publishers taking the economic risk, the resulting failure or success is most felt at the development level. New opportunities materialize for the studios that succeed, then more money from the publisher and greater freedom to determine the tone of the next project. For those who fail, one single wrong turn can mean disaster.

That was something that brothers Bo and Ulf Andersson learned firsthand in the summer of 2008. They were two guys from Huddinge, outside of Stockholm, whose names were on the lips of everyone in the gaming industry. In just a couple of years, they had taken the game studio Grin from being a small newcomer to one of Sweden’s most talked about. The company worked on several large games, among them a hyped-up new interpretation of the eighties classic Bionic Commando (commissioned by Japanese Capcom), and a game based on the movie Wanted (to be published by French game company Ubisoft). Grin’s breakthrough came in 2006, with the war game Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter. The game was hailed by the critics, became a retail success, and was celebrated with expensive champagne at the corporate office. Some of the gaming world’s absolute top people had their eyes on Grin and flew to Stockholm to listen to the Andersson brothers’ visions of the future.

A few years later, there were rumors in the business that Square Enix itself, one of Japan’s most esteemed video game publishers, had hired Grin for a high-stakes prestige project. The Andersson brothers had been given the task of developing the next installment of the iconic gaming series Final Fantasy. It was a huge deal. Japanese publishers seldom use Western game studios for their most important titles. Being asked to work on the next sequel of Japan’s most famous video game series was, for a relatively unproven Swedish developer like Grin, comparable to two newly graduated architects from Sweden being asked to redesign the Sydney Opera House. Grin expanded swiftly and hired new people. By the end of 2008, the company had nearly three hundred employees and offices in far-off places like Barcelona and Jakarta.

Then things took a turn for the worse. Neither Bionic Commando nor Wanted received the warm welcome that Grin had expected, right when the financial crisis made game-players think twice before opening their wallets. Sales were so-so. Not a disaster, but not good enough for Grin to count on making back the enormous amounts of money they had invested. Their Japanese employers began to worry.

Just before summer 2009, they received the fateful news; Square Enix was withdrawing the Final Fantasy contract from Grin, mumbling something about deficient quality, and canceled all payments. The Andersson brothers could only look on as their life’s work began to fall apart. The company they had devoted their lives to building was impossible to save. In the summer of 2009, Grin filed for bankruptcy and 250 people lost their jobs.

2009 was a sobering year for the Swedish gaming industry. Several years of astronomical growth were followed by a major decline. Total sales in the industry fell by 17 percent. Since then, the figures have improved, but the fantastic growth of the first years of the twenty-first century has completely vanished.

With constantly ballooning budgets and increasing competition for players’ cash, it’s easy to see, in retrospect, the signs that the gaming industry was painting itself into a corner. There’s nothing wrong with the games—interest in computer games is greater than ever, and Swedish-designed and developed games are internationally acclaimed. However, there is evidence that the traditional publishing model, favoring large, lavish game productions at the expense of smaller, bolder ideas and innovation, had perhaps grown about as large and profitable as it was going to get.

This is where Midasplayer, into whose offices Markus first stepped in the fall of 2004, comes into play. Their business concept contradicts many of the industry’s established truths. The company develops only the kind of small, simple, web-based games that Markus was hired to design more of, games played on computers, cell phones, or on a tablet, either through an app or on the website King.com. Midasplayer offers innumerable versions of popular board games and card games, along with variations of well-known arcade games and puzzles. Most of them can be played free of charge—provided the player agrees to watch a few ads. Others cost a few dollars a month to play. In many of the games, you can even bet on yourself and win a few bucks if you’re good.

Today, Midasplayer is one of Sweden’s largest gaming companies. In 2012, it had more than a hundred employees, tens of millions of players every day, and nearly $14 million in sales. The company is in many ways the antithesis of how a traditional game studio like DICE operates. It has no publishers or stores acting as middlemen—games are bought online and the players’ money goes right into the pockets of the game developers. Indicative of the potential that investors see in the model, the gaming giant Zynga, specializing in Facebook games and perhaps Midasplayer’s biggest competitor, had an estimated value of nearly $9 billion when it went public in December 2011. Most experts with an eye on the gaming industry feel that it’s the small, simple productions like the ones created by Zynga and Midasplayer that will reap the future profits. And it was in this corner of the industry that Markus began his career as a professional game developer.

Chapter 5

“They Just Don’t Get It.”

Markus’s first few months at Midasplayer were good. Fantastic, even. Every morning, he got himself out of bed and out the door, to the commuter train and into Midasplayer’s office in central Stockholm. It was a dream job for a young game developer. Hundreds of thousands of people played the games he and his colleagues put out on the web. Besides, he was well paid.

Markus was one of the first game developers to be hired at Midasplayer. Soon there were a few others, until around twenty people shared the office. Everyone worked according to the same, well-practiced model: each individual game was developed by a group of two to eight people and never took more than four months to finish. It was a fast and, more important, very cheap way to develop games. Markus liked working fast and, as a developer, having some degree of control during the whole process.

But soon he realized that it wasn’t a love of quality games that determined which projects he and the other programmers were assigned. The management at Midasplayer had an ice-cold mathematical approach to their products. Games that immediately earned a lot of money or showed a high virality (Midasplayer-speak for spreading quickly via recommendations among friends and acquaintances) were praised as hits. The company quickly put the developers to work on sequels, enhanced with better graphics and new features, to entice the player to spend even more money and time.

At the same time, innovative projects, usually the games Markus liked, were quickly brushed aside as uninteresting. Midasplayer’s successes came from an extreme reach—several million players who each paid a small sum—and a narrow concept of what they considered appropriate to produce. All the games were built on a few, well-established concepts. Card games and board games were popular, as well as clones of arcade classics like Puzzle Bobble (a “bubble shooter” or “bubble spinner,” as they were called). Many titles were almost identical to one another, differing only in graphic themes, sound effects, and scoring systems. Trying new things was just not a part of Midasplayer’s business plan.

For Markus, that insight was depressing. Sometimes it felt more like he worked in a casino, responsible only for trimming the poker tables and roulette games, than in the world of game creation that he’d dreamt about.

But there were advantages to having a stable job. Just before he started at Midasplayer, Markus was finally able to break his promise (or threat?) to live at home with his mom for the rest of his life. She wasn’t sure why he’d changed his mind, but one day Markus came home and told her that he’d found an apartment in Sollentuna, north of Stockholm, that he wanted to buy. The place wasn’t extraordinary, but at least it was his. When the paperwork was complete, Markus took his computer, clothes, and the rest of his stuff, gave Mom a hug and vanished.

It’s common for parents to visit their children’s first own home and be appalled. Ritva describes Markus’s apartment in Sollentuna as a disaster zone: The bed unmade, the floor covered with dirty clothes and empty soda bottles. And everywhere, games. There were floppy disks, CDs, and game boxes in a glorious mess. The only thing that wasn’t covered with a thick layer of dust was Markus’s computer. When Ritva came to visit, she couldn’t resist going over the place with a vacuum cleaner and a wet rag, scrubbing away the worst of the grime.

“It’s like he doesn’t see it. For him, it’s completely irrelevant if it’s a mess,” says a person close to Markus, who often visited him in Sollentuna.

While Markus had moved out of the house, gotten a steady job, and was making money, his sister was sinking deeper into drugs. There were times when Anna was homeless and living on the street. The siblings kept in touch, and Anna describes her brother as the only fixed point in her life at that time. But they were seeing less of each other, and when they did meet, it was usually about money. Markus hated to see Anna losing control, but he didn’t know what to do to help her. Giving her money was meaningless, he knew that, but when she asked for it, he seldom had the heart to say no. Anna remembers one of the many instances when she called on her brother at home. Markus took a five-hundred-kronor bill ($70) from his wallet and held it out to his sister.

“Take this now and you’ll never get anything else from me,” he said.

Anna swallowed her pride, took the money, and disappeared.

Perhaps his messy family life was one reason why Markus clung to his job. In spite of everything, it was still the best job he’d ever had and besides, he really liked the other programmers. Markus always describes himself as quiet and shy, but if you ask his colleagues, a different image emerges. When with his closest coworkers, Markus was happy and open. He was the one who made sure they went for beers after work or got together for a couple of rounds of Counter-Strike or Team Fortress 2 during their lunch break. People at work shared the same interests, the same deeply rooted fascination with computer games and programming, and were just as nerdy as he was.

Markus found a better outlet for his ambitions outside of work. He and Rolf Jansson had already realized their plan to develop a game together. It was titled Wurm Online, and it was an extremely ambitious project for two amateur developers. An online role-playing game, Wurm Online was a spacious and open world, where a large number of players took part simultaneously. The game differed from others of the same genre (the immensely popular World of Warcraft, for example) mainly in its openness. The world born of Markus and Rolf’s vision was one where the players were free to change anything they wanted—to build houses, dig mineshafts, earn money, or wage war on one another, for example.

Markus Persson and Elin Zetterstrand playing video games at the Mojang office in Stockholm. Photo courtesy of Elin Zetterstrand. Photo by Joshua Corsen (@averad).

When Markus began working for Midasplayer, Wurm Online had already been live for a couple of months. The two friends spent almost all their free time on the game, thinking, planning, and programming together until the early morning hours. They didn’t make any money from it, at least not yet, but for Markus and Rolf it was enough just to see how increasing numbers of players found their way to their fantasy world and chose to stay inside it. For Markus, Wurm Online was a creative refuge. There, he could test his own ideas and develop the game as he wished, without asking his managers at Midasplayer for permission.

With time, Markus became a knowledgeable and experienced game programmer, particularly with the Java programming language. With experience came the task of teaching newcomers at the firm. Management often had to contend with the fact that those who showed up for the job interviews didn’t always know a lot about game development. Most often, they figured it would work out anyway and counted on the more experienced developers to take the new talent under their wings.

Among the new talent was Jakob Porser, who had recently become a father and had been a consultant before his job vanished in the dot-com crash a couple of years earlier. After that he took a course in creative programming at the college in Gävle—the same course that DICE’s CEO, Karl Magnus Troedsson, had completed barely ten years earlier. Jakob then moved to Stockholm to find work, and Midasplayer hired him. To learn more, he was assigned to sit next to Markus. With his dark mop of hair, his rectangular glasses, and his quick speech, Jakob seemed very different from Markus. Besides, he had a baby to support, which meant that he felt differently about his new job. Earning a paycheck was his highest priority.

But like Markus, Jakob loved computer games, and the two programmers immediately hit it off. They had the same interests and sense of humor and could end up sitting for hours at work, absorbed in conversations about obscure computer games. As with Rolf Jansson a couple of years earlier, Markus and Jakob had a shared enthusiasm for Magic: The Gathering, and when they weren’t playing the game themselves, they were discussing ways to improve it.

Markus told Jakob about his experiences with Wurm Online. Jakob listened with interest and told Markus about the game he dreamed of developing. It would be a kind of digital version of Magic: The Gathering, where the cards were stored in the computer and the players could meet in matches over the Internet; a strategy game in a fantasy world, but also inspired by the card collecting and trading that characterized Magic. Markus loved it. After work they’d go to a pizza shop and remain there until late into the evenings, fleshing out Jakob’s roughly outlined ideas, discussing game mechanics, and polishing their plans for the future.

Markus also met his future wife at Midasplayer. One day at work, he passed by a conference room on his way to his office and saw through the glass wall a short woman sitting with her back toward him. One of the managers was on the other side of the desk. It was obviously a job interview. The girl being interviewed was Elin, and she was hired a few weeks later as an online community coordinator. Her job was to manage the company’s contact with users of Midasplayer’s casino games, making sure that everything worked and helping players solve any issues.

Elin’s first day at Midasplayer was June 1, which also happened to be Markus’s birthday. That evening, all the programmers went out to celebrate, and Elin came along. Markus had already decided he wanted to get to know her and now, with a couple of beers under his belt, he mustered the courage and introduced himself. The exchange must have looked comical—Elin is as short and thin as Markus is tall and large—but the two remained in each other’s company the whole evening. They talked about computer games, and even though Elin was no programmer, she was just as devoted to games as Markus. They even had the same tastes.

Computer games brought Markus and Elin closer during their initial friendship. Every day at lunch they connected their computers and tried to kill each other in Team Fortress 2 (Markus won most of the games then, says Elin, but she makes it very clear that today she gets at least as many points as he does.) They soon began spending more time together; they went out after work, then out to dinner, then to the amusement park Gröna Lund. His colleagues soon realized that Markus and the girl from the casino department were a thing.

Elin also became the person Markus went to when he needed to vent his irritation over the managers at Midasplayer. It was increasingly obvious that he wasn’t happy at work. He liked being responsible for every aspect of a game project, from idea to implementation, and it drove him crazy having click statistics and profit as the only goals to strive for.

“They just don’t get it,” he would say to Elin after work. “They’re idiots.”

When Markus began working at Midasplayer, company policy forbade employees from making money on independently developed games. That wasn’t particularly odd; few employers like to have their employees moonlighting with what can be seen as a competitive enterprise. However, during Midasplayer’s first year, no one took the rule seriously. Besides Wurm Online, which Markus had worked on before he was even hired at the company, he kept developing his own little games in his free time, mostly as a way to explore the ideas he wasn’t allowed to pursue at work.

Management didn’t really think that Markus’s amateur coding was a problem. It didn’t disturb his workday at the company, and there was nothing to complain about in Markus’s performance. They just looked the other way. However, the more Midasplayer grew, the more strictly the rules were enforced, and Markus felt it firsthand one day in the fall of 2008. He had just finished his latest hobby project, a game called Blast Passage. It was a kind of combination of two classic arcade games, Bomberman and Gauntlet, and for those who know their gaming history, the result was both cleverly allusive and appealing. Blast Passage was simple, fun, and full of winks to the old eighties titles that inspired it. Not without certain pride, Markus sent out an e-mail to the other employees at Midasplayer with a link, encouraging them to try it out. The reaction was not what Markus expected.

Versions of what actually happened differ, depending on whom you ask. Markus describes how, almost immediately after sending the e-mail, he was called into a 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 his own demands. He was only interested in working at Jalbum on the condition that his employer would not interfere with his hobby and would let him continue developing games in his free time. Of course, his future boss shrugged his shoulders and said yes. Carl Manneh, CEO at Jalbum, couldn’t care less about what Markus did in his free time, as long as he came to work on time and did what was expected of him while he was there.

With an offer from Jalbum secured, it didn’t take long for Markus to again quit his job at Midasplayer. But before he did, he discussed the matter with Jakob. Immediately after leaving Midasplayer, Markus intended to sit down and start developing a new game, he said, and if, contrary to expectation, he succeeded in making any money at it, the two friends would proceed with their plans and start a game studio together.

Markus’s decision to leave was a direct consequence of Midasplayer’s refusal to let him develop games in his free time. However, it was also because Markus’s perception of the gaming world differed fundamentally from that of the bosses at Midasplayer. To them, the games were products for consumption; they could just as well have been selling detergent or toilet paper or candy. To Markus, the games themselves were the be-all and end-all. If he wasn’t allowed to work on the projects he liked, he might as well do something else.

Markus was not alone in harboring these sentiments. Just as in the film or music industries, the conflict between commercial success and creative freedom has always been present in the gaming world. Midasplayer had grown into a large, established company, focusing on tried-and-true concepts that would generate the most profit from each hour of development. Minecraft, which would grow into one of the most successful games of the decade, was born from a different tradition. In order to understand how it happened, you need to move the spotlight away from the arena of commercial mass production and onto another, completely different, and often overlooked corner of the gaming world.

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.

After Markus became familiar with Infiniminer, he immediately sat down and began recoding his own game. He changed the third-person perspective to a first-person point of view and redid the graphics to make them even more blockish. It was a step away from the traditional strategy game he’d picked from his models and toward a more adventure-oriented setup. After a couple of days of frantic coding, Markus leaned back in his chair, satisfied as he saw the puzzle pieces beginning to fall into place. Building, digging, and exploring took on a totally new dimension when players saw the world through the eyes of their avatars.

In early May 2009, Markus uploaded a video recording of a very early version of Minecraft on YouTube. It didn’t look like much more than a half-finished system for generating worlds and Markus gleefully jumping around inside it, but still, the essence of it hinted at how the game might look when it was done.

“This is a very early test of an Infiniminer clone I’m working on. It will have more resource management and materials, if I ever get around to finishing it,” is Markus’s description of the clip.

Someone on the fringes might regard what Markus did as intellectual-property theft. Without beating around the bush, he revealed where he found his inspiration and even went as far as to call Minecraft a clone of an existing game. But game developers, more than other kinds of artists, often find their starting point in an existing idea that they then work on, change, and polish. All studios, large and small, keep tabs on what their competitors are doing and frequently borrow from their games. Still, game developers seldom accuse others of plagiarizing. Almost all platform games originate from the mechanics that Nintendo put in place in the first Super Mario Bros., released in 1985. And more or less all role-playing games build on the structure that was developed in games such as The Bard’s Tale. That’s why Zachary Barth refuses to single out Markus as a thief. He even speaks about how he himself used Team Fortress 2 and the indie game Motherload as inspiration for Infiniminer. Actually, he’s tired of the constant questions about if he feels ripped off considering the millions of players and dollars that Minecraft has pulled in.

“The act of borrowing ideas is integral to the creative process. There are games that came before Infiniminer and there are games that will come after Minecraft. That’s how it works,” says Barth.

About this time Markus, after discussing the matter with some friends at the TIGSource forum, decided to call his game Minecraft. The name was a combination of the words mine, for mining ore in shafts, and craft, as in building or creating something. The name is also a wink at Blizzard’s strategy games Warcraft and StarCraft, and the enormously successful online role-playing game World of Warcraft. Initially, the game had the subtitle Order of the Stone, a reference to the online series Order of the Stick, of which Markus was a fan, but that idea was scrapped before the game was released to the public.

Markus was convinced that he was onto something big, but convincing the world around him of the excellence of his game was not so easy. A bunch of different ideas merged into Minecraft, and explaining them without any kind of demonstration was complicated. Over coffee with his mom, Markus attempted to describe in sweeping gestures the new project he was working on. He told her about the building, the exploration, and the atmosphere, and then explained how the game would be both easily accessible and complicated at the same time. Maybe it could develop into something great, he thought aloud. Maybe he should give notice at work and focus entirely on Minecraft. Ritva smiled slightly. It sounded like a really good idea, she’d said to her son. But maybe he should start by working only part-time? It wasn’t entirely easy to support oneself on game development alone. He’d said that himself before.

In truth, Markus’s idea was all Greek to her. Plus she remembered the year after high school, when he didn’t look for work, didn’t study, and barely went outdoors for days at a time. What would happen if he became just as obsessed with another project, something that could be just as important to him as building with LEGO pieces had been when he was in elementary school but that earned him next to nothing? She was worried, and yet, she saw how his eyes lit up when he talked about the game. He became confident, self-assured.

Elin better understood what Markus was thinking. She was among the first in the world to try out a working version of Minecraft. As soon as it was ready, Markus sent it to Elin and asked her to play. When she logged in and started up the world, what she got was basically a tech demo—a world of blocks beneath a blue sky. But Markus’s intentions were immediately evident to her. A couple of minutes of digging and building and she was entrenched in the game.

“This is SO much fun!” she said to her boyfriend.

From that moment on, Elin was Markus’s game tester. Every time he added a new feature to Minecraft, he sent her the latest version. Markus often stood watching over Elin’s shoulder while she played, listening intently to her comments. If Elin liked something he’d done, he seemed to reason, the rest of the world would probably like it, too.

Even before Minecraft was shown to the public, Markus had made a couple of important decisions that would have a huge influence on the game’s continued development. First, he wanted to document the development openly and in continuous dialogue with players, both his semiprofessional colleagues at TIGSource and any others who might be interested. Markus updated his blog often with information about changes in Minecraft and his thoughts about the game’s future. He invited everyone who played the game to give him comments and suggestions for improvements. In addition to that, he released updates, in accordance with the Swedish saying “often rather than good” (meaning someone who prefers spontaneity over perfection). As soon as a new function or bug-fix was in place, he made it available via his site, asking players for help in testing and improving it.

Second, Markus knew from the beginning that he eventually wanted people to pay for Minecraft. In the back of his mind were his talks with Jakob at Midasplayer and their dream of starting their own game studio, so it seemed only natural to put a price on his game. And it was better to do it as soon as possible.

It doesn’t sound very controversial, but the fact is that Markus’s decision went against most of the current trends in the gaming and Internet world. Many technology prophets talk about the road to riches on the web being through charging as little as possible for your products, preferably nothing at all. At most of the well-known Internet companies, for example Google and Facebook, the cash comes mainly from ads. In the gaming industry, the trend points to “micropayments.” Rovio-developed Angry Birds, which costs one dollar from the App Store, is maybe the best-known example. Another is the Swedish-developed online game Battlefield Heroes. It’s a variation on the popular game that’s free to play, but players can buy new equipment and better weapons for a few dollars each.

Markus disregarded all such things. Minecraft was to cost around thirteen dollars during the alpha phase, the first period of development, mainly because it was a sum that he felt comfortable with. When the game was completed, the price would double.

“The reason that I released the game so early was that I would never have been able to finish it otherwise. Charging money was the same thing. I knew that I would never feel that it was good enough to put a price tag on. So I charged from the start,” says Markus today.

Anyone looking for more refined business logic behind what would become the most profitable gaming phenomenon of the last decade is on a fool’s errand. Markus is notoriously disinterested in business and economics. When someone asks him to reveal the secret behind Minecraft’s unbelievable financial success, he just smiles and shrugs his shoulders. He just followed his gut, he says, did what felt right and what worked for him. To the question of what was the most important thing he learned from Minecraft’s early sales, Markus answers:

“I understood that an orange splash where it says ‘half price’ works really well. That’s what I had on the site during the alpha phase.”

On May 17, 2009, Markus uploaded the first playable version of Minecraft onto the indie forum TIGSource. “It’s an alpha version, so it might crash sometimes,” he warned. Other forum writers immediately began exploring the blocky world that Markus presented to them. There was a lot of digging, building, and discussing. The game crashed at times, but even at that early stage, it’s clear that Minecraft was exerting an unusual magnetism on players.

It took just a couple of minutes for the first reactions to come. “Oh hell, that’s pretty cool,” someone wrote. “I hope you make something really good out of this, dude, I think it has a lot of potential,” another encouraged. Barely an hour after Markus uploaded the game, the first image of a Minecraft construction was posted in the forum thread. “This is way too much fun. I built a bridge,” wrote the person who uploaded the image. Others filled in, adding their own constructions. A castle, a fortress, a secret treasure chest. Someone wrote that he’d tried to make a boat, but the result was too ugly to make public. Someone else built a giant phallus, but never uploaded an image, just relied on a vivid description of the work: “It was such a thing of awe that Firefox decided to pack it in before I could snap a shot of that mofo.”

Markus followed the postings with great interest, listening to bug reports and discussing Minecraft’s future with others on the forum. Friends and family remember how he told them enthusiastically about the warm welcome Minecraft had received. Many games are uploaded on TIGSource every day, but few struck a chord with the audience the way Markus’s game had. In his head, a ray of hope began to shine. Maybe he was on the right track this time.

In early June, Markus described his intended pricing model on his blog. Those who paid for the game were promised access to all future updates at no extra cost. A free edition of Minecraft would still be available, but only the current half-finished version of the game. For those who bought a copy of Minecraft immediately, there was a discount. When the game entered beta-development, the price would be raised to $20, and the finished version would cost $26. On June 12, Markus opened for orders. Twenty-four hours later, he clicked on the sales statistics and could hardly believe his eyes. Fifteen people had paid for the game. In just twenty-four hours, more than $150 had landed in his PayPal account.

Elin and Jakob were two people who really noticed the effect the early sales successes had on Markus. Elin remembers how he obsessively followed the growing numbers of games sold. She hesitates to describe him as nervous, but clearly Markus was very focused on the early reactions to the game. Seven games purchased per day felt unbelievable.

Initially, Markus dismissed these sales as a passing fad. But every day the number of discussion threads about Minecraft on the game developer forum grew larger, and increasing numbers of people visited them. All the while, the sales counter continued ticking upward, slowly at first, then faster. At home in Sollentuna, Markus did a quick calculation: If I can sell more than twenty games a day, that’s enough for something approaching a decent salary, he thought, and made up his mind. Then I’ll quit my day job. Then I’m really doing this.

Chapter 8

The Hedonic Hot Spot of the Brain

Early comments on the first version of Minecraft didn’t seem particularly noteworthy at the time. Reading them now, they seem rather prophetic. Minecraft was then a very simple game, with only a fraction of the features that it has today. You could only dig up blocks and put them where you chose; that was it. Markus hadn’t had time to put in the animals, monsters, or anything else he had planned for the game. Still, the response was overwhelmingly positive. Players built things, took immediate screenshots of their creations, and uploaded them online. Within a few years, millions of others would be doing exactly the same thing. The question is why? What made Minecraft so easy to like right from the start?

Understanding why certain games are fun and others are not spans disciplines such as psychology, art history, and neurology. Game publishers invest enormous sums to determine what it is that will get players to spend an extra hour in front of the screen.

Minecraft completely disregards the fact that other game developers go to great lengths to create worlds in which every detail is shaped with millimeter precision. In the racing game Gran Turismo 5, players can whiz around the Nürburgring in an almost photo-realistically re-created Lamborghini or Ferrari racecar. The action-adventure game Assassin’s Creed II lets the player climb tall buildings with soft, lithe movements, perfectly adapted to the jutting edges and window ledges that are there to grab hold of. Once on top of a church bell tower in fifteenth-century Florence, he or she can gaze out over an exquisitely rendered version of the city.

Does all this mean that these games are approaching reality? Not at all. A resemblance to reality in games is not only difficult to achieve, it often ruins the experience. For most players, driving a sports car along Germany’s most famous racetrack needs to be much simpler than in reality. In the same manner, Ezio, the main character in Assassin’s Creed II, must have superhuman climbing skills if the game is to be any fun. However, it’s not enough that games make reality easier; in some cases they have to make it unreal in order to retain players’ interest.

In the first-person shooter game Halo, there are two ways you can injure enemies with a handgun: you can either shoot your opponent or, if you get close enough, you can club him with the butt of your gun. If Bungie, the company that develops Halo, had attempted to emulate reality, a smack of the butt would hardly cause injury at all, while a couple of gunshots would kill. In fact, the opposite is true. In Halo, a melee attack is often much more damaging than a gunshot. Making the game “realistic” would have made it feel one-dimensional. The design would have felt, strangely enough, illogical, since it’s more difficult to get close to an enemy than to shoot one from a distance.

This is where the strange logic of games becomes evident. The point is not to emulate reality but to adapt reality to clear, functioning rules. This phenomenon is a great deal older than computer games. Take chess, where the rook is more agile than the king, and pawns can only attack diagonally. Rock-Paper-Scissors is another example—a rock bashing scissors may be plausible; the scissors cutting paper also. But paper covering the rock would probably not be regarded as a victory if it weren’t necessary for the game to function.

So it’s not a problem that the world that greets Minecraft players doesn’t resemble reality. Instead, the blocky graphics activate an important mental ability. The human brain is skilled at reading patterns and is especially good at finding familiar shapes like faces and human figures. That’s the reason why we can see shapes in clouds and the face of Jesus on a slice of toast. When the image of a face consists of only a few lines, we fill in the missing pieces. Something similar happens in Minecraft. The pigs in the game resemble pink shoeboxes with heads and legs more than anything else, but there is no doubt to the player that they are pigs. Perhaps we should call the graphics “abstract” rather than simple. It’s an odd fact that game graphics risk seeming more unreal the closer they approach reality. Low-resolution game characters, such as Pac-Man, the pill-eating sphere from 1980, cannot be misinterpreted. It is often easier to identify with abstract, hand-drawn figures than it is with those that almost perfectly resemble humans but don’t quite hit the mark. Both robots and animated game characters often fall into that trap.

In 1970, the Japanese robotics professor Masahiro Mori coined the expression “uncanny valley.” The phenomenon can be observed when you draw a diagram of how attractive or pleasing a robot or animated figure is perceived to be by a viewer. Masahiro Mori succeeded in showing that we find such figures more pleasing to look at the more they resemble humans, but only to a certain limit. Virtual human faces that come close to the real thing but lack that little extra something—life in the eyes, perhaps, or natural muscle movements—become almost repulsive to look at. They feel dead, zombielike. The recognition curve drops into a deep chasm; that’s the uncanny valley. But then when the simulated face reaches an almost perfect level of detail, a level that few, if any, computer games attain today, the recognition curve turns upward again.

The characters in Minecraft are a comfortable distance from the uncanny valley. Playing on a server with others, a player sees fellow players as blocky figures, leaving it to each player’s imagination to “animate” the characters with real personality traits. If you know your best friend is the one who is maneuvering the figure on the screen, that’s who you will see. There is no preprocessed face interfering.

While Minecraft breaks with the gaming industry’s evolution toward photo-realism, the internal logic is infallible. This becomes most obvious when you build tools from minerals you’ve dug up. There are many recipes hidden inside the game; for example, two parts wood and three parts stone make a pickaxe if they are put in the correct places on a grid. Change the pattern and swords, furnaces, buckets, compasses, or pretty much anything appears. But the player never receives any help with the recipes—you have to figure out for yourself how to do it, or you have to go read about it on the web. There are so many recipes and they follow such a logic that the system almost feels organic. Minecraft exemplifies what is meant by a game having its own universe, with its own laws and logic. It has nothing to do with reality, but everything to do with a coherent, consistent set of rules.

As with all effort in gaming, even creating a tool must lead to some reward. It’s usually that the tool makes it easier to do something else, like digging up even more blocks. And pickaxes crafted from rare materials are, naturally, more effective than common ones.

Here’s where the question arises of what “reward” really means in a game context. Rewards can manifest themselves in many ways: getting to see the continuation of a story, one’s avatar receiving more power, getting to see a visually impressive film sequence, hearing a beautiful sound. The history of games is full of classic examples, like the ting you hear when Mario picks up a coin. But more than anything, the rewards are about that feeling of having solved a problem or puzzle. Why do we like that? There are theories that take us a good way down the road to an answer.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi is a Hungarian-American psychology professor who is interested in what it means to “feel good.” So much that he has established a branch of psychology that studies happiness, contentment, and creativity. In the 1970s, he began working on a theory for a psychological state he thought he observed people sometimes attaining. He coined the concept of “flow” to describe the feeling of introverted ecstasy that successful musicians, artists, and athletes sometimes experience.

“Flow” happens when you disappear into the task you have taken on and completing it becomes your sole purpose. The basis for Csikszentmihalyi’s hypothesis was laid down long before computers or video games hit the mainstream market, but in nearly every way, the condition is consistent with what players experience when they are deeply absorbed in a game. The world disappears and their hands seem to move independently as they steer their avatar toward new challenges. Good games give us challenges that are exactly the right degree of difficult. They give instant feedback and tell us if we have passed the test or not (for example, if an opponent died, or not). There are often hints to help the player along the way. Here is the essence of attaining flow; succeeding at task after task, with exactly as much resistance as we need to neither get bored because it’s too easy, nor so frustrated at its difficulty that we give up.

Also, playing games does not require us to get off the couch, carry anything heavy, or expose ourselves to unpleasant weather. Instead, we effortlessly steer an alter ego through a strange, exceptional world. Each separate action—digging up a block in Minecraft, climbing up a building in Assassin’s Creed II, or firing a shot in Battlefield 3—is accompanied by sounds and visuals that make the experience enjoyable, even when we fail. Playing the game is, in the words of the Hungarian-American psychologist, rewarding in its own right.

Perhaps this is how we must understand the balance between challenge and reward in computer games. Exactly what the reward consists of is not important, as long as the task of getting it challenges the player at exactly the right level. Perhaps our brains are simply made to enjoy succeeding at challenging things.

So, how well does this model fit Minecraft? In one aspect, it seems to be way off target—Markus’s game doesn’t have what Csikszentmihalyi says is a condition for flow: clear direction. Instead, the player invents his or her own aim—for example, building a fortress or finding a rare mineral. From this perspective, it’s also obvious why some players stop playing Minecraft immediately; they are the ones who never get around to building anything, and therefore can’t create a meaningful goal for themselves. So Csikszentmihalyi’s model actually suits Minecraft like a glove, as long as the player makes a decision about what to aim for in the game.

If games are so suitable for putting us into a state of flow, why isn’t everyone attracted to them? Are there differences in the brains of gamers? Simone Kühn believes so. She is a researcher in experimental psychology at the University in Ghent, Belgium, and is also interested in the brain’s capacity to experience pleasure. Deep inside our heads, at around eye level and halfway behind the neck, there is an area of the brain called the ventral striatum. The ventral striatum can be considered our center of hedonism, the part of the brain that is activated when we enjoy or anticipate enjoying something. Food, sex, and drugs get the striatum spinning, and it is often mentioned when discussing drug abuse or people who’ve developed a pathological dependency on gambling. However, the striatum doesn’t just turn us into slobbering hedonists; it is also connected to fast decision-making and the ability to take action. The same part of the brain that makes us attracted to fatty foods and drugs seems to help us get things done at work.

“It has been termed the hedonic hot spot of the brain. It’s not often the case that a brain region is so clearly associated to one function, but with the ventral striatum it is clear that it is involved with reward processing,” says Kühn.

To learn more about how playing computer games affects that place in the brain, Kühn went to Berlin. There, she found a group of test subjects and strapped helmets on them, looking into their heads with the help of an MRI device. The test subjects were asked to play an academically designed game. As expected, the striatum lit up when the subjects became involved in pushing buttons. But not everyone in equal measure. One group turned out to have larger ventral striata than others—they simply had more brain matter in this spot, especially on the left side. This group consisted of people who played computer games in their free time.

The conclusion was obvious: game players have different brains than others. The question then becomes: What causes what? No one knows if gaming makes the striatum grow or if a congenitally larger striatum makes one more inclined to play. It’s clear that certain personality traits seem to be more common among those who play a lot. They seek immediate rewards for their efforts and make decisions more quickly than others. If it could be proved that games make the brain’s enjoyment center grow, then it’s logical that these characteristics are strengthened by a lot of gaming. If that’s the case, then gaming may make us more active and give us quicker reactions, but it might also lead us to tend to choose short-term rewards rather than working long-term toward something greater.

From Csikszentmihalyi’s flow perspective, the attraction of Minecraft is easy to understand. It gets a little trickier when we get into Simone Kühn’s research findings. Minecraft doesn’t give the same immediate gratification as do many other games. Minecraft is more difficult and it only becomes really fascinating once you’ve spent days building a cathedral out of one-meter blocks, or digging a winding system of tunnels and furnishing it with electric rails.

Maybe that’s why Minecraft reaches outside the usual circles of devoted gamers. One way to explain it is to see Minecraft as something other than a game. Perhaps graffiti or dollhouses are better comparisons. Or why not adventure travel? Nintendo’s legendary game designer Shigeru Miyamoto has described something similar. He has cited his childhood in the Kansai region of Japan as the inspiration behind his classics such as Mario Bros., The Legend of Zelda, and Donkey Kong. There, he would explore the countryside for hours and find his own caves and paths in the woodlands. He is also attracted to simulated danger, playing with the audience’s need to experience things that make them jump but that are impossible in reality—falling from great heights or fighting colorful monsters, for example. Minecraft reflects a similar ambition. Few of us will ever build a cathedral of real stone, but in Minecraft, we can get an idea of how it feels.

The first members of the TIGSource forum who tested Markus’s game discovered the same thing. They hadn’t found a game; they found a playground for all they could imagine. At first, there were only a few of them. But then, as the forum threads filled up with comments praising the game and the constructions players made within it, Markus sold more and more copies of Minecraft. Soon, he’d discover that a lot more people than he believed possible were prepared to whip out their credit cards so they could experience it for themselves.

Chapter 9

“Yes, You Should Play This Game.”

July 2010. It was morning as Markus logged onto his computer at home, as part of the morning routine he had developed and rather enjoyed. Every time someone bought a copy of Minecraft, he received an e-mail. Since most customers were in the United States, most of those e-mails came in while Markus was asleep in Sweden and when he woke up, the purchase confirmations would be waiting for him in droves. Not only had clicking through them become second nature, it put him in a great mood. To Markus, those e-mails symbolized the acknowledgement of all his hard work and bore the fruits of his labors. And so many people willing to pay for Minecraft was pretty good indication that things were going pretty well.

On this particular morning, four hundred e-mails were waiting in Markus’s inbox. Four hundred people had bought Minecraft in the past twenty-four hours. Markus leaned back in his chair. He did some quick mental math. And he concluded that about $5,800 had found its way into his bank account since yesterday morning. A new record.

It had been a little over a year since the spring day when Markus first introduced Minecraft to the gaming world. A little over a year ago he hadn’t, not in his wildest dreams, imagined that the game would make any money to speak of. For one thing, it wasn’t exactly easy to get hold of. Minecraft wasn’t available on Steam, Xbox Live Arcade, or in any of the other established online outlets. Those who wanted to try it had to somehow find their way to Minecraft.net, a simple website Markus built, then laboriously enter their credit card numbers, download the game, and install it on their own machine. Not exactly user-friendly and hardly optimal from a marketing standpoint.

But it worked anyway. As the days passed, word spread of the odd little game. The first to discover it were the already somewhat obsessed—devoted gamers and programmers looking for inspiration and the next big thing. And then word reached beyond the usual indie circles. Within a couple of months, game blogs and discussion forums started teaming with accounts from enraptured gamers showing off their creations. The more they wrote, the more eyes turned toward Markus’s game. While all Markus did was continue programming and documenting his progress online.

Total sales of Minecraft passed twenty thousand that summer, and it was with a dizzying feeling in the pit of his stomach that Markus realized he was well on his way to becoming a rich man. He remembers to this day the happy visit to the ATM that produced the bank statement that verified he had over $150,000 (SEK 1 million) in his account. He and Elin framed the bank statement and hung it on their apartment wall. “They say that the first million is the hardest,” Markus told his girlfriend with a satisfied grin.

Soon Minecraft caught the attention of Markus’s own heroes. Brandon Reinhart, a programmer who worked on Markus’s favorite game, Team Fortress 2, wrote on the game’s blog that the next version of the game would probably be late. The development team had developed a deep and serious Minecraft addiction, he explained. “Yes, you should play this game,” he wrote, adding a link to Markus’s website. Sales more than doubled overnight.

It wasn’t long before Markus was making more money from Minecraft than from his day job at Jalbum. He stayed on, but gradually cut back on his hours, and spent the other days at home fine-tuning Minecraft. Markus still believed the success was temporary. It will be over soon, he thought.

But sales kept climbing.

Sales were not the only thing on the up-and-up. So was Anna. After being homeless and a drug addict, after giving Markus many empty promises about cleaning up her act, Markus’s sister was finally getting her life back on track. Going to rehab had led her to staying sober for several years, as did continuing to go to support groups. Now she had a new partner and a new baby daughter; a new life. For the first time since they were kids, Anna and Markus’s relationship did not revolve around her dependency and did not entail her asking him for cash. And while Anna still felt guilty about their past, Markus had already put it behind them.

Even their father had been staying clean for longer stretches, and in that time Markus began to mend their relationship. He would sometimes visit Birger out at his cabin in the country, and the two of them would spend the weekend cooking, swimming, sitting together on the porch and admiring the landscape, and talking about anything and everything. Things between them were better than they’d been in years, and while his father’s drug-free period would turn out to be short-lived, to say that Markus enjoyed this time of his life would be an understatement.

Markus had promised himself—even before Minecraft’s breakthrough—that he would, as soon as his finances allowed, dedicate himself entirely to his own gaming endeavors. He and Jakob had already invested innumerable hours in daydreaming about the game studio they hoped to create together; they already knew where the money from Minecraft would go: into developing Scrolls. Also, Markus was tired of coding alone. He needed someone to bounce ideas off of and hang out with during the day.

Giving notice at his day job was no small decision, and Markus found, to his surprise, it was more difficult to do than he’d expected. He still didn’t believe his success was going to last. Sure, the money was rolling in right now. But in six months? A year? Add to that the fact that Markus had left behind his messy apartment in Sollentuna and had moved into a place with Elin in Kärrtorp. It was more important than ever to be able to count on a stable financial situation.

Jakob was facing a similarly tough decision. Unlike Markus, he had stayed on at Midasplayer, and the company continued to earn serious money. He’d been asked to step up and manage the company’s game developers. For a father with a toddler at home, it was a very attractive offer. A management job with a great salary, at a company with a promising future. Jakob and Markus found themselves at the same crossroads that most people with entrepreneurial dreams encounter at some point in their lives. On the one hand: a secure work life, with a permanent job and a monthly salary. On the other hand: a rare opportunity to realize a dream. With Minecraft in their back pocket, they couldn’t ask for better circumstances. But daring to take the next step. . . they would need a little shove.

That little shove came in early August 2010 in the form of a phone call to Markus’s cell phone. He answered and a polite American voice sounded on the other end. The voice introduced himself as a representative of Valve Software, congratulated Markus on Minecraft’s success, and wondered if the Swede might be interested in visiting Valve’s head office in Washington State for a cup of coffee.

To understand why Markus still gets excited when that phone call comes up, you have to appreciate the special status Valve enjoys in the gaming world. The company elicits approximately the same type of response from gamers as does Apple from gadget lovers. Valve’s first hit game, Half-Life (from 1998) is still praised as one of gaming history’s most revolutionary titles. The same goes for its sequel, Half-Life 2.

Valve is known mainly for two things. First and foremost, the studio’s uncompromising focus on quality rather than on quantity—in its almost fifteen years of existence, Valve has only released a handful of games. There’s also an unbelievably long time span between releases; Half-Life 2 came out almost six years after part one in the series (but to be fair, honed to perfection). Valve’s inordinately long gestation period has given rise to the expression “Valve time”—meaning the difference between the time that Valve promises a project will be finished and when it actually is. The next sequel in the Half-Life story should have been released for sales on Christmas Eve 2007. Fans are still waiting for it, patiently.

Second, Valve is an independent company, with its founder, Gabe Newell, still at the helm as CEO. Thanks to megahits like Half-Life, Valve has the revenue to be able to invest in untried ideas. So for many indie developers, Valve represents the “good” side of large-scale game development: nearly inexhaustible resources to put into exactly and solely the games they choose without the influence of “the suits.” Take Portal for example. The game was born from one developed by students at the DigiPen Institute of Technology. Valve employees caught sight of the game (Narbacular Drop, then) at a Careers Day at the institute. They liked it so much they offered the students jobs to develop it, and the result was one of the most talked-about and highly acclaimed game series of the first decade of the new millennium.

Markus surmised that the person on the phone was probably not interested in just a cup of coffee. He intuited two possibilities behind the polite invitation: Valve was either interested in buying Minecraft, or Valve was going to offer Markus a job. It’s not unheard of for established game developers to take on successful indie projects, and it was possible that Valve had decided to now try to do with Minecraft what they’d done with Portal a few years earlier. But the American wouldn’t say more than that Valve was impressed by Minecraft and would like to meet Markus and get to know him. If they could agree on the time, the American would arrange both airline tickets and hotel. Despite the elusiveness, Markus didn’t need to think twice before answering yes. Job offer or no, meeting the Valve people, maybe shaking hands with Gabe Newell, that was every game developer’s dream.

“Okay then,” Markus agreed—he hesitated a second, then decided to go for it—“but I want first-class tickets!”

First-class tickets it was. The voice at the other end of the phone line thanked him and promised to make the arrangements as soon as possible. Markus would go visit Valve’s head office the first week in September.

With the trip on the horizon, Markus and Jakob knew it would soon be time for a decision. There was no way Markus was not going. Yes, their plan to start their own studio in the fall was still the same, he told Jacob, but he still wanted to keep a foot in the door. You don’t just wave off a potential job offer at Valve without some consideration.

“What would you say about moving to the United States?” he asked Elin a couple of days later.

In the time between the phone call and the ensuing Valve visit, interest in Minecraft grew at an astonishing rate. Markus watched in awe as the sales stats climbed to levels he’d never imagined. During one twenty-four-hour period, more than 23,000 copies sold. Almost one game every three seconds.

One day Markus received a grim e-mail from PayPal. The e-mail explained that his account had been temporarily blocked because clearly, he must be involved in some kind of criminal activity to have so much money flowing in so fast. At that time, Markus had almost $860,000 in his PayPal account. Swedish and international media outlets alike began to contact him, asking for interviews. Within a couple of months, from being one of thousands of anonymous amateur programmers, Markus had risen to the status of international gaming celebrity.

It was around this time that the signature hat debuted in Markus’s life. He says he got the idea from Jakob, who showed up one day to a meeting wearing one just like it. Looks sharp, thought Markus, and went to find one for himself. After trying out several different styles, he chose a black fedora. A similar hat graces the head of Indiana Jones. Michael Jackson often wore one, too.

Markus says it’s mostly coincidence that the hat is ever-present in his ensemble. But it can also be read as a symbol of his sudden fame. While it’s not uncommon for programmers to work under an alias, few have created so definitive an alter ego as has Markus. Notch is as outspoken and boisterous as Markus is shy and taciturn. Markus likes few things less than speaking in front of a group of people, but on Twitter and his blog Notch will make X-rated puns and biting remarks to other game developers in front of an audience of hundreds of thousands. Markus seldom uploads photographs of himself on the Internet; instead he goes with the picture of Notch, a hand-drawn caricature, with a big, lavish beard and the trademark hat. Markus isn’t in any way secretive about his true identity, but it’s obvious that—consciously or not—he nurtures two radically different sides of his personality. One is private, withdrawn, and has thinning hair. The other is public, likes attention, and always has the hat pressed down over his ears.

Valve booked Markus at the Westin, the luxury skyscraper hotel in central Bellevue. He had a room near the top. Through the window, he could see far to the west, past the well-kept suburbs by Lake Washington to the city of Seattle beyond. Markus noted that all the luxury homes by the lakeside had pools. You could live a good life here if, if that’s what you wanted. Close to the water, lots of room, for both him and Elin. It had to be expensive, but a programmer at Valve, just a short drive away, could probably afford it.

Meanwhile, things were still going undeniably well with Minecraft. A couple of weeks before his trip to the United States, Markus had asked on his blog if there might be some Minecraft players in the Seattle area who were interested in meeting up with him while he was in town. He was free all day Tuesday. Maybe they could organize something?

“It doesn’t have to be anything fancy, perhaps a café somewhere. And I figured we could call it MinecraftCon 2010 even if it’s just three people sitting around in uncomfortable silence for twenty minutes,” he wrote.

When Markus walked into the little park in Bellevue at the appointed time, more than fifty people had found their way there. Several streamed the gathering live on the Internet via their cell phones. Some were dressed as Minecraft characters. One young man is seen in photos from the meet wearing a full-length Creeper costume built out of green-painted cardboard. For several hours, Markus answered questions about Minecraft and shared his thoughts on the future of the game and his plans for the company he was thinking of starting with Jakob. The sky was overcast when the meeting came to an end, but Markus walked away smiling ear to ear.

The evening before his meeting at Valve, Jakob and Markus chatted on Skype. Jakob asked Markus what he would say if the question of employment came up, but he didn’t get a straight answer.

“I want to find out what they want,” was all Markus said.

Markus understood, just as his friend in Stockholm did, that there was a lot riding on the next day’s meeting, for both of them. If Markus decided to stay in Seattle, their common venture would never be. If not, they vowed to make it happen.

“I’ll get back to you in twenty-four hours,” Markus promised.

Once the conversation had ended all Jakob could do was wait. In the back of his mind, he realized that the next day would decide his fate. He would either accept the management position at Midasplayer, which would mean more meetings, more responsibility, and less time for coding and game development, or he and his best friend would launch their dream project. The decision was entirely Markus’s.

Markus remembers his visit at Valve’s headquarters as a jumble of impressions. Before he was allowed into the office, he had to sign a nondisclosure agreement, promising not to tell anyone about the half-finished productions he would see in there. He met Robin Walker, the man who wrote the original Team Fortress and was employed by Valve to lead development of the sequel. Brandon Reinhart, who’d written the post on the Team Fortress 2 blog that made Minecraft sales soar, showed Markus around. Markus did indeed get to shake hands with Gabe Newell. The Valve boss was very busy, Markus recalls, but the fact that he seemed to know of both him and Minecraft felt like an honor.

Afterward, Markus was shown into a conference room with a man from Valve’s Human Resources department. The man spoke candidly about the corporate culture at Valve and what it was like to work for the company. Markus told him a little about himself and his plans for Minecraft before realizing that he was in the middle of a job interview. Valve had prepared a programming exercise. The man from the HR office—Markus doesn’t remember his name—asked Markus how he would go about programming an elevator. Markus thought for a while, then answered in as much detail as he could. The Valve representative listened, nodded his head, and fired some additional questions at Markus where appropriate.

When the exercise was over, papers were put aside. The assessment: you are a gifted programmer, but you’re not used to working in a group. We can help you with that. Markus listened intently when the opportunities at Valve were described to him. It was perhaps the most sought-after place of employment in the business. A chance to make a difference and to be a part of the absolute cutting edge of game development. We would like to work with you, he was told. Are you interested in working for us?

This is where the story could have taken a different turn. Markus could have said yes and moved to Seattle. Maybe he and Elin would have lived in one of the luxury homes by Lake Washington, with both a pool and a view of the lake. Maybe Minecraft would have become a downloadable game in Valve’s Steam shop. Maybe Markus would have simply left Minecraft behind to work with a couple hundred other Valve programmers on the next installment in the Half-Life series.

But that didn’t happen. Markus describes it as one of the hardest decisions of his life, but when the HR person asked him that question, Markus answered politely but firmly. No.

“Somehow, I felt that Minecraft was maybe my chance to create a Valve, rather than work at Valve,” he says today.

On the other side of the Atlantic, Jakob sat at home in Stockholm, his cell phone in hand. It beeped. A new text message from Markus: “You can quit your job.” The next morning, Jakob did just that.

Chapter 10

The Squid Situation

It was evening in Stockholm, but it would be a while before the late summer sun would set. Markus, Jakob, and Carl Manneh, Markus’s former boss as Jalbum, sat at a table at Ljunggrens Restaurant, on Götgatan. A server glided up to the table and they ordered sashimi. The subject at hand was starting a company.

A few days had passed since Markus had returned from his visit to Valve. The two friends were ready to start their company, but there were some knots that first needed to be untangled. Markus was already netting tens of thousands of dollars daily in Minecraft sales. Letting Jakob in as a partner in the company would mean he’d be giving away half of his creation—hundreds of thousands of dollars—with no guarantees. Markus wasn’t interested in starting a company by himself, but he also didn’t want to risk destroying his friendship with Jakob over money, nor did he want to be Jakob’s boss. They were friends, and friends don’t hire each other, they reasoned.

That’s why they’d brought a business plan to the dinner table. Today, no one remembers its exact details, just that the structure of the company the two programmers described to Carl was extremely complicated. Markus and Jakob would own the company together, but not really, and somewhere, a huge loan would compensate for the financial inequality of the relationship.

Carl chewed his fish and listened. For him, the evening was also something of a job interview. Shortly before, after leaving Jalbum to work full-time with Minecraft, Markus had carefully asked if Carl knew of anyone who would be a good CEO for the company he wanted to start. Carl Manneh had answered yes and immediately nominated himself. Now he was here, listening to two excited programmers describe a crazy idea for a company. Not that the business would have any problems staying afloat; he knew very well that Minecraft was already pulling in enormous sums of money. But the structure Markus and Jakob were suggesting was among the most bizarre he had ever heard of.

Carl gives a discreet impression the first time you meet him. He doesn’t speak more than necessary and doesn’t brag nearly as much as he could. His facial expressions seldom reveal what is really going on in his mind; you could call it a poker face, or just prudence. Regardless, it’s a characteristic useful in negotiations, both with giant international companies and with gifted programmers who have strange ideas about how to run a company. When Markus and Jakob finished, Carl pushed his plate aside and volunteered, as humbly as possible, his alternative. The duo—or the three of them if he were trusted—would form a new company they owned together. Markus would keep the immaterial rights to Minecraft in his own company, writing a license that gave the new company exclusive rights to develop and sell the game. No one needed to give away his life’s work and no one became the other’s boss. The future CEO excused himself and went off to the men’s room. The two programmers sat quietly at the table for a little while. Then Jakob turned to Markus.

“You know, I feel about seven years old right now.”

“Yeah, I know what you mean.”

It was perhaps at that moment the business structure of Minecraft was nailed down. Markus and Jakob already had an idea of what kind of company they wanted to start. At Mojang, everything would revolve around really great games, innovative games. They would brainstorm ideas and together develop the games they had always dreamed of. Markus wanted to work on Minecraft for another six months, and after that, the money would finance new projects—starting with Scrolls. With the millions from Minecraft safe in the bank, there was no reason to compromise that vision. But they needed someone to keep finances in order, to see to the financial development and all the other stuff that belongs to the world of business. Markus and Jakob had only a vague idea of how to run a company, even less of the experience necessary to steer the enormous endeavor that they’d decided to undertake. After dinner at Ljunggrens, the two programmers agreed—Carl was the right man for the job. Markus and Jakob offered him a position, a place on the board, and a partnership in the new company. Carl accepted. On September 17, 2010, Mojang AB was registered, with Markus Persson and Jakob Porser as main owners and Carl Manneh as CEO. They took the name from mojäng, the Swedish word for “thingamabob” or “whatchamacallit,” dropping the umlaut from over the letter a.

With the licensing model Carl suggested, most of the money from Minecraft went to Markus. The sliver remaining for Mojang would still be more than enough to hire several programmers, build upon Minecraft, and to begin looking toward the future of the company.

First and foremost, they needed an office. They chose an apartment just a couple of blocks away from Ljunggrens, a few stories up in a building on Åsögatan—a more carefully considered location than it might seem at first glance. The blocks around Medborgarplatsen on Södermalm are, to game developers, historic ground. A short stroll through the area surrounding Mojang’s office will take you by several famous game studios, where games worth millions of dollars are developed each year.

Begin at the door of Mojang, on Åsögatan, and turn west. On Götgatan, you’ll find Paradox Interactive’s office. Paradox is one of the world’s most famous strategy-game studios and publishes titles such as Europa Universalis and Hearts of Iron. Avalanche has its studio on the other side of the same building. Around the corner, more than seventy employees work for Electronic Arts–owned Easy Studios, which develops the online game Battlefield Heroes. Stop for a second and turn southward. On the horizon, less than a mile away, just over the Skanstull Bridge, you can just see the sports arena Globen. Next to the giant sphere is the site of the infamous police raid on the file-sharing site Pirate Bay in 2006. The game studio Fatshark is also located there, perhaps best known for the role-playing game Krater, which takes place in a postapocalyptic Karlstad (a city in Swedish Värmland). Continue north on Götgatan, past the skateboard ramps at Medborgarplatsen. At Slussen, you can peek up toward the Glass House by the dock, where DICE is enthroned in its headquarters.

Markus Persson, Jakob Porser, and Daniel Kaplan at work in the Mojang office. Photo by Elin Zetterstrand.

This is where most Stockholmers get on the subway. A visitor interested in the Internet can instead walk up Katarinavägen to Renstiernas gata were, in an old bunker under Mariaberget, there is a data center belonging to the Internet company Bahnhof, the former home of the world-famous whistleblower site Wikileaks. If you then turn north, walk through Gamla stan and past Kungsträdgården, you’ll arrive at Birger Jarlsgatan and the headquarters of the music company Spotify.

Stockholm is a small city, but per capita, few cities in the world have meant more for the development of IT. If you ask anyone you meet in Stockholm what he or she does for a living, the answer probably has something to do with computers. The fact is that systems developers make up the largest single occupational category in the city; there are more professionally active programmers in Stockholm than there are nurses’ aides, salespeople, or economists.

For the past three years the international business school INSEAD has ranked Sweden as the world’s second most innovative country—after Switzerland, but ahead of Hong Kong, Singapore, and the United States. Today, Sweden is also one of the world’s most broadband-dense countries, with nearly 100 percent coverage, calculated by population. Besides great broadband connections, large investments have made it possible for Swedish IT companies to grow. It’s easy to get stuck harping on the many bankruptcies of the early twenty-first century, but many venture capitalists have also made a lot of money on fast-growing Swedish technology firms. For example, those who invested in Spotify in 2008 watched as the value tripled in only two years. Companies such as Skype, Tradera, and MySQL have also pulled in big money for their investors. In these contexts Scandinavia is significantly overrepresented, being home to 22 percent of Europe’s largest software companies despite accounting for only a few percent of Europe’s population. In the last few years, one tenth of all sales (“exits” in investor-speak), for a total of more than a billion dollars, have been made in the Scandinavian countries.

The question is, why has it turned out that way? Some people point to a straightforward and uncomplicated business culture. Paradoxically, others credit it to Sweden’s small population. Just over 9 million residents are just not enough to sustain a company selling only to the domestic market. Another country with similar challenges is Israel, which also has a small population and has made large technological advances. Both Israeli and Swedish technology companies are forced from the beginning to think globally and aim for the world market. That same logic applies to the game industry. Apart from a few successes with games built around well-known children’s-book characters, such as Mulle Meck (Gary Gadget) and Pettson and Findus, Swedish game developers have always worked with an international audience in mind. That’s why they could make early contacts with international publishers and learn the economic structure of the global game industry.

However, just as important for the growth of the Swedish gaming industry has been the fact that Sweden consumes the pop-culture diet of the English-speaking world. That’s what Per Strömbäck, spokesperson for the Swedish game industry’s interest group Dataspelsbranschen says.

“We discovered Dungeons and Dragons at the same time as the Americans did. We’ve read the same comics and listened to the same music,” he explains.

That, combined with a good command of English from an early age, has given Swedish developers an advantage in the art of creating games with the right cultural content to reach an international audience.

“It’s given us an enormous edge in comparison to many other countries in Europe. They have the technical knowledge, but their cultural frames of reference have been totally different,” says Per Strömbäck.

From the perspective of the gaming industry, the IT bubble—and especially its collapse early in the first decade of the twenty-first century—was of great significance. Large numbers of newly started IT companies, which only a couple of years earlier had been hyped to the heavens, crashed spectacularly. The immediate result was that tens of thousands of experienced programmers were thrown out of work. Given the well-developed digital infrastructure in Sweden, this created very fertile breeding ground for technology entrepreneurs, as well as a nearly bottomless labor pool for game-development companies to dip into.

Mojang’s office on Södermalm may have been right smack dab in the middle of the city’s game cluster, but from the street there were no visible signs that the building now harbored one of the world’s most talked-about game studios. To enter, visitors had to press a button on the intercom marked with a small, discreet sign that read “Mojang.” Most of the time it didn’t work. The intercom was hooked up wrong and was connected to some other phone somewhere in the building (no one ever succeeded in figuring out exactly which one). If you didn’t have Markus’s, Carl’s, or Jakob’s telephone number, you had to press another button instead and ask one of the neighbors to open the front door.

With time, the shabby apartment became a little cozier. One of the walls was covered in artificial grass and decorated with a large Mojang logo lit from behind. The entire back wall was decked out with a painting of mine shafts and small figures inspired by Minecraft’s blocky graphics. The office soon felt typical of a young company in a creative business, equal parts playground and workplace. Anyone who’d worked for a quickly-growing dot-com startup during the late nineties would have felt at home.

It took Carl a few months to extract himself from his job at Jalbum, which he’d had for two years. But it’s not surprising that he accepted Markus and Jakob’s offer. In 2010, Jalbum posted a loss of over $570,000, and this with a turnover of just over $425,000. The company had costs that more than doubled their revenues, and that was a good year. It’s not unusual for new companies to show initial losses, but there’s a limit, after which investors lose their patience and want their money back. It would be safe to say that Jalbum was approaching that limit when Carl decided to cut his losses and leave.

Nothing could be more different from Jalbum than Mojang. There, Carl saw the opportunity to lead a company that was starting out with an initial success. Even as Mojang was being founded, there was plenty of buzz about Minecraft. At Jalbum, Carl regularly had to badger his way into meetings with investors and then, once there, to more or less beg them to buy shares of the company so he could keep paying his workers’ wages. Now it was the opposite. Now investors called him asking to be allowed to put cash into Mojang, but Carl didn’t need them.

Paying wages was not the problem; instead, the challenge lay in finding the right people to pay. And it needed to happen fast. They needed someone to take care of the server that players logged into so that Markus could devote his energy to the game. The website where people bought the game was due for an overhaul, and someone needed to get started on a version of Minecraft for smartphones. Carl, Jakob, and Markus made recruitment a high priority, and in less than a year, Mojang went from being a small startup to being a miniature gaming empire. Of the handful of new hires, everyone, except Carl Manneh and Daniel Kaplan who were brought on as business developers, was either a programmer or a graphic designer.

One of the first to be hired was Jens Bergensten, a tall, skinny programmer with long red hair in a ponytail. Markus had met him the year before at No More Sweden.

“Markus was already somewhat of a local hero by then. Minecraft had been around for a couple of months, and everyone knew it was his game,” says Jens.

When the two met for the first time at No More Sweden, Jens had just begun playing Minecraft. He’d brought a friend, Pontus Hammarberg, and a severe case of the flu.

“Pontus had just returned from the United States and had probably brought the swine flu back. We sat up around-the-clock playing Minecraft. When I slept, I dreamt fever dreams about how my buildings fell apart. They were large pyramids crashing down, and I was forced to fix them,” he says.

Like Markus, Jens’s interest in programming games has followed him since childhood. When he was twelve, he got fed up with the fact that only two people could play at a time in the 1980s game Nibbles, a variant of the classic cell-phone game Snake. By fooling around with the code, he found exactly which parts needed to be copied in order to let three people play the game simultaneously. Along with that find, Jens also discovered a fascination for programming. He understood that all those rows of incomprehensible combinations of symbols made up the game itself. Games were fun, he thought, so obviously code was also going to be fun. After finishing school, he worked as an IT consultant for a while, then later became one of several programmers to work on the Swedish web game Planeto. He wrote his own games in his free time, participated in contests, and socialized with other programmers.

“I’m not the world’s best programmer. I just happen to work very well with Markus. We have the same design philosophy and the same sources of inspiration,” says Jens.

Officially, Mojang hired Jens to program the server parts of Scrolls. But Scrolls was mostly just an idea in Jakob’s head when Jens started working on it, so he asked if he could sit down and check out the code behind Minecraft instead. The next version of the game was to be released before Christmas. To finish it on time, Markus accepted all the help he could get, and better yet from someone who, like himself, had dreamed of making a living developing games since he was a kid.

Once installed at Mojang, Jens tried to get a handle on the code that Markus had written, which might sound like a cakewalk for someone who has never done programming. But writing code is creating art. Give the same problem to two programmers and they’ll give you two completely different solutions. And few will come up with constructions as odd as Markus’s. He’s a lone inventor—a solo programmer, through and through. Wrapping one’s head around his creation entails, in a way, understanding how his brain works. And it’s a brain that has earned him membership in Mensa.

As the end of 2010 was approaching, Markus and the others took some time off for Christmas. Jens, who doesn’t like Christmas, went to work as usual. The office was empty, most of the nearby lunch restaurants were closed for the holidays, and the heating system in the turn-of-the-previous-century building was broken. It was below freezing outside and pretty cold inside the office too. Wearing his jacket and scarf, Jens sat there alone and continued working on Minecraft, having been given no instructions except to try “to build a few features,” as Markus had told him in passing before taking off for the holidays.

He spent a lot of time on wool. On dyeing it, especially. Jens liked the square-shaped sheep that scampered around in the Minecraft world, but thought that their color was boring. If players could only get some more colors, then they would have yet another way to modify their environment, he figured. He used his frozen fingers to type out different ways of extracting dyes from minerals. He pondered the color black for a long time and came to the conclusion that squids would be the natural source from which it could be extracted in the Minecraft world. And so he created an appropriately blocky squid figure and programmed it into the game. A few days after the New Year, it was time to demonstrate his creations.

Carl stood nervously, shifting his weight from side to side as Jens clicked the new animals onto the screen. Markus stood next to him. Carl knew that there was a very real possibility that the creator of the game they all made a living on would hit the brakes and reject all of it. A real possibility of instigating a conflict that could put a big stick in the spokes of the company wheels. An exaggeration? Not at all. No one had ever touched Markus’s life work before. If you take game development as seriously as he does, the situation could be compared to Michelangelo’s apprentice having worked overtime one weekend painting his own people on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Shit, meet fan, Carl thought.

However, when Jens demonstrated his new features on screen, Markus’s lips parted in a smile. Here was someone who got it. Now and then, he asked a question, and Jens patiently answered. After that session, it was obvious that Jens would receive an entirely overhauled job description. Now there were two people developing and designing Minecraft.

Chapter 11

A Dilemma Concerning House Cats

“I’m going to demonstrate to you how I really don’t play Minecraft like other people,” says the voice on the YouTube film.

The viewer peers into what looks like a deep shaft. The walls are gray and are built out of bedrock. The gamer, Halkun, calls it a well.

“I’m sure you’re probably thinking, ‘Why, Halkun, that is a very, very deep well!’ And I’m going to show you the reason why. It is currently holding. . . ”

The camera turns 180 degrees.

“. . . this!”

A structure looms up, so large it seems to disappear into the distance. The Starship Enterprise. In full scale. It’ll boggle the mind of anyone who has painstakingly put block to block to build something in Minecraft. Creating the whole spaceship from the TV show Star Trek must have taken weeks, maybe months.

The clip continues and Halkun gives a guided tour, talking about the model. The film has been viewed over 10 million times and is a typical example of many people’s first Minecraft encounter.

“I haven’t slept yet, so I’m gonna be a little loopy!” says Halkun triumphantly.

Minecraft’s breakthrough coincided almost perfectly with the rise of the YouTube phenomenon Let’s Play. It’s exactly what it sounds like—a person recording himself or herself playing a popular computer game. The video clip often has a voice track of the player describing what’s happening on the screen and talking about his or her impressions of the game. Let’s Play is closely related to an older but similar phenomenon called Machinima (a combination of the words machine and cinema), a kind of film genre that uses the game world as the stage and its characters as actors. It may sound incredibly specialized, but Machinima has long been an established form of expression in the gaming world.

Minecraft and Let’s Play turned out to be a good match. Since Minecraft encourages its players to create their own goals and challenges, each gamer’s experience is unique. In the gaming world, concepts such as emergent gameplay and emergent storytelling are used to describe these phenomena. For many players, the main objective in Minecraft is not the game itself, but rather the documentation and public viewing of their creations.

One might assume it’s a hobby for a nerdy and obsessive group of people, except that the number of people drawn to the Minecraft videos is staggering. In the spring of 1966, John Lennon said in an interview that the Beatles were “more popular than Jesus.” Markus has never expressed himself in the same terms, but might have significantly more reason to do so. Calculated in number of Google searches, Minecraft briefly surpassed Jesus in popularity in early 2011. During the summer of 2010, YouTube’s in-house analysts named Minecraft the year’s fastest-growing trend. There are several million video clips about the game. During the month of May 2011 alone, more than 35,000 Minecraft films were uploaded—that’s more than a thousand a day—and while most of them are only viewed a few times, truly popular clips can attract a huge audience. The most widely viewed Minecraft clip ever is “Revenge,” a cover of Usher’s hit song, “DJ Got Us Fallin’ in Love,” complete with a music video in which a Minecraft character sings about his hardships with thieving Creepers. Nineteen-year-old Californian Jordan Maron, more well known as “Captain Sparklez,” created it. At the time of writing, “Revenge” had been viewed over 92 million times.

Two more Minecraft filmmakers who have attained similar levels of stardom are Simon Lane and Lewis Brindley, two young Englishmen who are collectively the heart of the Let’s Play phenomenon The Yogscast. In about four years their YouTube channel has racked up nearly 1.8 billion views. It’s not easy to describe a Yogscast clip to an outsider. Like popular TV shows, Yogscast is divided into seasons. Each episode is around twenty minutes long, and new ones are uploaded to YouTube every week or so. The setup resembles a kind of improvisational theater, with the Minecraft world as the stage, props, and cohesive frame of reference. Most often, Simon and Lewis follow a loosely written script with a fantasy theme, but improvise wildly and supply the characters with their own voices.

The third season of Yogscast is based on Simon and Lewis’s avatars Honeydew and Xephos (one is a Tolkien-inspired dwarf warrior with a red beard, the other, a Minecraft version of Commander William Riker, from the TV show Star Trek: The Next Generation). They save the world from the evil wizard Israphel. The two men are funny, quick-witted, and likable. They often lose their train of thought, start to laugh, or get distracted from the story by something irrelevant that catches their interest. For the viewer, the experience is reminiscent of listening to two guys playing a computer game together, which is, more or less, exactly what it is.

Successful Let’s Play filmmakers earn big money from their works. For a few years, YouTube has been sharing a slice of its massive advertising revenue with those who provide content for the site, but it’s hard to find out exactly how much. Google, YouTube’s owner, is very tight-lipped about what the agreements look like. Also, the revenue varies depending on the season, choice of subject, and how much ad room Google’s sales department succeeds in booking at a given time. But the consensus among filmmakers is that the video ads shown before a film clip generate between one and two dollars per thousand views for the creator of the clip. It doesn’t sound like a lot, but with the enormous numbers of viewers that YouTube videos attract, the dollars quickly add up. Jordan Maron is supporting himself completely on the revenue from “Revenge” and other video clips. In a good month, Simon Lane and Lewis Brindley can make tens of thousands of dollars from their Yogscast episodes.

Not everyone is lucky enough to live off of YouTube fame, but many video makers can supplement their normal income with a few hundred dollars extra a month by playing Minecraft for an audience. SethBling (known to the public only by his handle) is one of them. His day job is at Microsoft’s Xbox division in Seattle, a job that would make many a programmer envious. On his free evenings and weekends, he invests almost all his time in playing Minecraft.

SethBling came into contact with Minecraft through a roommate. He approached the game with a programmer’s eye and quickly discovered redstone. After experimenting with it for a few weeks, he decided to begin uploading videos of his creations to YouTube. On his channel, there are demonstrations of how redstone can be used to build elevators and train stations, automatic doors and a machine to teleport wolves. He has also re-created classic computer games such as Minesweeper and Donkey Kong, fully playable within the Minecraft world. His work consists of complex, detailed constructions that spin Minecraft in completely new directions, and actually have more in common with exercises in programming or engineering than with gameplay.

“I like Minecraft for precisely the same reason that I like programming. I have full control of the world and can shape it exactly as I choose. I can test different constructions and mechanical systems in order to see what the results are,” he says.

Re-creating classic games in Minecraft has become something of a distinguishing mark for SethBling. His breakthrough came when Markus began taking notice of his creations, thanks to a video that was popular on the discussion forum Reddit. In it, the video maker showed how he had re-created the classic Nintendo game Duck Hunt in Minecraft. Markus found the link, had a good laugh at the clip, and tweeted it to his followers on Twitter.

In the world of Minecraft, being mentioned by Markus on Twitter is called being “Notched.” A quick look at the Minecraft inventor’s account gives us a clue as to why such a seemingly unpretentious action has a name of its own. At the time of writing, over 700,000 people follow Markus on Twitter. The short message, with a link to SethBling’s ingenious creation, was the digital equivalent of sending a letter to almost all of central Stockholm with a promise of free entertainment in exchange for a mouse click. Within forty-eight hours, 300,000 people had seen the film. In a flash, SethBling had 4,500 new subscribers to his YouTube channel.

“Notch doesn’t tweet about YouTube clips very often, but he seems to be nerdy in exactly the same way I am. That’s lucky for me,” says SethBling.

In a good month, he makes a couple thousand dollars from YouTube.

Markus’s status as the creator of Minecraft gives him considerable sway in the world of the game. A single link from his Twitter account puts a spotlight on whoever has his attention, a kind of fame that can also be turned into revenue through YouTube ads. It’s probably one reason that the image of Markus, in a pixely and stylized shape, recurs in many of the most impressive Minecraft projects you can see in films.

While Markus’s status is self-evident, he is far from the only one with great influence in the world of Minecraft. After all, he’s not the one uploading the vast number of films online—millions of players are doing that. Which means that neither Markus nor anyone else at Mojang has much control over how the image of Minecraft is shaped on the Internet.

Mojang has never paid a dime for ads or PR for Minecraft. Instead, the players themselves have generated the enormous hype surrounding the game. It’s a perfect example of “viral marketing,” the art of utilizing people’s social networks to spread awareness about something new. The extensive YouTube community that has grown around Minecraft isn’t just the result of the game’s popularity; it’s also the main cause of it being a hit from the start. Every time a Minecraft player uploads a video to YouTube, the chance increases that someone, somewhere will notice the game and decide to try it out. And the more people who play Minecraft, the more video clips are uploaded. If it hadn’t been for Yogscast, Captain Sparklez, SethBling, and all the other YouTube celebrities, Minecraft would never have reached such a large audience as it has today.

That would be a nightmare scenario for a company with an obsessive need for control. Big companies hire hordes of PR consultants, marketers, and crisis managers to chisel out communication strategies, advertising campaigns, and rules for what information the company will divulge. All of this is thrown overboard when unbridled YouTube filmmakers are allowed to take over.

Alex Leavitt is someone who closely examines that phenomenon. He’s a researcher at the University of Southern California, focused on culture, media, and digital communication, and he is interested in how the Internet affects the production of creative works and changes the way we relate to and consume popular culture. Minecraft is one of his primary objects of study.

“Minecraft is this obscure little game that became a worldwide phenomenon in more or less a couple of weeks. It just exploded. I want to understand how all these millions of people playing it have affected its development,” says Leavitt.

Alex Leavitt regards Minecraft as an example of what he calls “open-source culture.” By that he means popular culture that is created symbiotically by its originators and its users. American academic Lawrence Lessig has coined the concept “read/write culture” for more or less the same thing. Both point to a form of cultural production that preempts the traditional concepts of producer and consumer.

What makes Minecraft such a wonderful object of study, says Leavitt, is that the game became popular long before it was finished. As the finished version wasn’t released until MineCon 2011, players, at an early stage, had the opportunity to influence how the game would look and play. For years Markus has been engaged in constant dialogue with his players about the future of Minecraft. On his blog he has comprehensive documentation of successes as well as mistakes and thoughts about the game’s development. On Twitter and in discussion forums, he has consistently encouraged players to give him feedback for future versions. Responding to the hundreds of suggestions and opinions that pour in daily would be impossible, but Markus can often be seen on discussion threads about Minecraft, and he talks daily with his players on Twitter. If nothing else, he’s created a feeling of accessibility; anyone can offer a suggestion and maybe have it taken into account in the next version of Minecraft.

Markus’s constant presence also creates a strong emotional bond between the game and its players. When Carl wants to impress other CEOs and company bigwigs, he doesn’t mention the millions of people worldwide who play Minecraft, or the five thousand people in Las Vegas who stood up and applauded when Markus got up onstage. Instead, he mentions what in marketing lingo is called “user engagement.” Mojang’s figures show that 75 percent of those who paid for Minecraft in the last two years are still active players. They are what Carl would call “monthly active users.” According to him, this many of them may well be a world record. Or, as one player says, “It doesn’t feel like you’ve bought a game. It feels like you own a part of it.”

Alex Leavitt likes to talk about “narratives” in a more abstract way. In a piece of music, a book, or a more traditionally designed game, the narrative is built in. The composer has designated the melody, the game designer programs the challenges that lie on the way to the next level, the playwright has worked on the dramaturgy, and the actor interprets the role for the camera. In Minecraft, a meaningful narrative arises in the interplay between gamer and game.

“When you talk about movies, music, or games, the creative process typically takes place far from the user. Minecraft doesn’t work that way. It is better seen as a platform, where the users provide the content,” Leavitt says.

In Creative Mode, designed for players who just want to build without worrying about monsters, this can be taken to an extreme. For a long time, Markus was opposed to such a play mode in Minecraft. The whole challenge would vanish, was his reasoning. Where’s the fun in that? However, among players, Creative Mode turned out to be possibly the most popular style of play. Markus listened and, when the beta version of Minecraft was released, one of the big innovations was better support for the users who wanted to re-create things such as the Eiffel Tower in full size rather than worry about being attacked by zombies.

That decision, which originated with the players and not with Markus, is perhaps the strongest contributing factor of why Minecraft grew into such a phenomenon. Without Creative Mode, few of the most impressive Minecraft constructions would have been built—the creations that have done the most to give the game attention and attract new players.

Markus Persson, Carl Manneh, and Jens Bergensten preparing for MineCon 2011. Photo courtesy of Mojang.

The strong sense of commitment that Minecraft instills in its players is also a reason that some of the Internet world’s most influential investors have taken an interest in the game. One of them, David B. Pakman, was quick to see the potential of Mojang’s creation. In the 1990s, he had worked for Apple and founded the division that would later create products such as iTunes and the iPod. He has been the CEO of eMusic.com, one of the world’s largest digital music stores, and for the past couple of years has been a partner in the venture capital firm Venrock Associates, which owns significant stakes in several leading Internet companies.

David Pakman discovered Minecraft when his kids began playing it after school. He watched, captivated, as they sat for hours in front of the computer, longer than with any other game, and he realized that the odd little creation from Sweden was something extraordinary. Pakman contacted Carl to hear more about Minecraft and to ask if he could offer some advice to the newly started company. Since then, he’s been an informal adviser for Mojang on questions regarding business strategy and development. He has also become a devoted Minecraft player.

David Pakman is polite in a typically American fashion. He is careful not to criticize anything about Markus’s creation or to describe Minecraft with anything but praise. However, on one point he is refreshingly clear: the true value in Minecraft is not in the game, its inventor, or anything that Markus or Mojang’s programmers have done. The real value lies in the enormous community of devoted players gathering around Minecraft and filling it daily with new content.

Actually, David Pakman doesn’t think Minecraft should even be referred to as a game. Markus’s creation has more in common with social networks such as Facebook and Twitter, he feels. Minecraft is inherently a social experience. It’s an activity to gather around, and therefore also a reason to socialize. If Facebook can be likened to a kind of hangout spot on the Internet, maybe a bar or a restaurant, then Minecraft is the digital equivalent of people meeting to play soccer together.

That point of view has serious implications for the future of Minecraft, and for what Markus, Jens, Jakob, and the others at Mojang spend their days working on. There are millions of enthusiastic players out there with ideas about new functions, new monsters, challenges, and experiences to add to Minecraft. The developers at Mojang can’t possibly compete with that. If Minecraft is to become as lucrative as possible, David Pakman says, it would perhaps be wise if Markus and Jens Bergensten stopped seeing themselves as game programmers and instead focused on developing the game as a social platform.

That’s a job description few game programmers would sign up for, and perhaps Pakman senses that his reasoning is approaching a sensitive subject, because he apologizes:

“It’s hard to say that anything about Minecraft should be different, because it hasn’t exactly hurt Mojang to do things as they have. For them, it’s a question of identity. Markus describes himself as a game maker, not as a creator of social and creative platforms, and of course, he should continue to do so,” he says.

Alex Leavitt finds just these kinds of discussions fascinating. Musicians, filmmakers, sculptors, architects, and game designers are all driven by the will to create, he says. To give shape to an idea and put their own stamp on it. Traditionally, the emphasis is on the individual creator—the artistic genius, the gifted musician, the visionary film director, or the game designer—as an elevated and respected person. To Leavitt, Minecraft questions that very view of artistic creation.

“How much of what Minecraft is today can be traced to Notch and how much is the result of the interplay with the community? There’s a tug-of-war there, between the creator’s vision and the users’ visions, which I think is very interesting.”

Leavitt isn’t the only one thinking along these lines. So is Jens, especially since he began working full-time on Minecraft. Jens is a typical programmer. What he likes best is to sit undisturbed, hunched over the keyboard, with plenty of time to develop the Minecraft world as he pleases. He is also a very creative person. He loves the artistic aspect of making games, programming new monsters maybe, or rewriting the code that determines how waterfalls work. When asked what he is most proud of in the game, he mentions the code he’s written for generating underground caverns. In Version 1.2 of Minecraft, (released in winter 2012), Jens added house cats to the game. He got the idea from thinking about his own cat, Newton, at home in his apartment.

However, as Minecraft grows larger, Jens’s job becomes more about making it easier for others to create and less about doing it himself. On Mojang’s long “to-do list,” two things are currently at the top: new functions for multiplayer games and an official plugin API, an interface that lets players program their own functions into Minecraft without permission from Mojang. These are functions that players have asked about for years, but they are far from the waterfalls, squids, and house cats that Jens otherwise so eagerly talks about.

We ask him what he would most like to do. If he could choose to work only with the pieces of Minecraft that he thinks are the most fun, what would they be? He ponders a bit before answering.

“It’s more fun to create my own stuff. But I’ve realized that I can’t compete with the whole world in coming up with the best features.”

He’s silent for a while, then adds, a little sadly, “We need to get started on things we’ve talked about but never got around to doing. Now that the game is officially finished, it suddenly feels a little urgent. We can’t just fool around any longer.”

Alex Leavitt laughs when he hears about Jens’s thoughts.

“That’s exactly spot on. These developments are new and very interesting. But for anyone working creatively, they are also a little depressing.”

Chapter 12

Too Many for Two Pizzas

In March 2011, about six months after the dinner at Ljunggrens, Carl, Markus, and the others at Mojang took a couple of days off to go to the Game Developers Conference (GDC), in San Francisco. Every year, GDC attracts tens of thousands of people to a weekend devoted to panel discussions, game demonstrations, and networking. Amateur developers, who’ve saved up for months to fly there, mingle with the big bosses from Sony, Microsoft, and Electronic Arts; journalists; and legendary game developers.

Before the trip, they’d considered how they could market their game effectively at the conference. There are many interesting things to see at GDC. To get journalists to listen and business colleagues to notice you, you need to offer something extra. But what? The game’s main character, Steve, had already become somewhat of a cult figure in indie circles, so someone had the idea to simply print Steve’s face on cardboard boxes and make holes for the eyes, thus creating fun, characteristic Minecraft-like headgear. Besides being cheap to produce, the Steve masks could be flattened out and piled up, making them easy to transport to the United States.

To spice up the stunt, Markus and the others tweeted that only those who visited Mojang’s little booth wearing blue T-shirts (the color Steve wears in Minecraft) would be able to take home a Steve mask. Carl ordered a hundred “Steveheads.” It was a lot, he thought, but they could always find some use for the leftovers.

Now Carl stood bent over a boxful of cardboard heads, turned toward the wall in the little booth that Mojang had erected at GDC. Behind him, he heard the buzz from the convention floor, but was busy unpacking and assembling masks. The room was hot, he was sweating, and his back began to hurt. Also, he was worried that no one would show up. True, Minecraft had received a lot of attention in development circles, and Mojang was now making more money every week than most small developers made in a whole year. But at GDC, they were competing for attention with some of the giants of the business. This year game designer John Romero was revealing what had happened behind the scenes when the classic shooter Doom was created. Dustin Browder, the man responsible for some of the world’s most popular strategy games, was talking about the philosophy behind StarCraft 2. At the same time, Nintendo’s top man, Satoru Iwata, was showing the latest entry in the Zelda series, one of Nintendo’s most important game series. Would anyone care about an odd little game from Sweden? Carl focused on the cardboard box in front of him. Regardless, the masks needed to be folded, and as CEO for a small startup company, he had to be prepared to step in where needed.

His anxiety didn’t last long. When Carl stood up to stretch his back, he turned out toward the convention floor for the first time. In front of him was an ocean of people, all with their faces turned toward Mojang’s booth, all wearing blue T-shirts. They looked like one swelling wave of people. Carl didn’t get the chance to count, but it was pretty clear that there were considerably more than a hundred of them. Mojang’s batch of Steve heads was gone in minutes.

During the winter of 2011, Minecraft went from being a well-liked indie game to becoming a sensation. Awards and honors rained on Mojang. Markus and his colleagues returned home from GDC with five shiny trophies in their luggage. Among other things, Minecraft was awarded for Best Innovation, Best Debut, and Audience Favorite. “I am so happy now you wouldn’t believe it,” Markus tweeted on the way home from the conference. On January 12, Minecraft surpassed one million copies sold. Hardly three months later, the number had doubled. Each day, Markus left work tens of thousands of dollars richer.

In the midst of all this, Markus, Jakob, and Carl stood with one single unfinished game on the merit list and a newly founded company to nurture. They had huge ambitions and lots of plans to put into action. Several new people had been hired, and the work on Minecraft continued. But most of all, the trio was just trying to keep a solid foothold in the circus that was spinning around them.

On one occasion, the Internet legend Sean Parker popped in at their headquarters on Södermalm. The man who had started the music site Napster a decade earlier and later became one of the top directors at Facebook and one of Silicon Valley’s best-known investors listened with curiosity to Markus, Carl, and Jakob describe the company they ran together and their plans for the future. When asked if they would consider accepting a small investment, Carl answered politely but firmly no—Mojang didn’t need money. Sean Parker shrugged his shoulders and thanked them, but before he left the office, he asked if the three guys had any plans for the evening. He’d been invited to a party and was looking for some company.

It was not an issue that the party in question was at the celebrity club The Box Soho, in central London. Naturally, Sean Parker had his private plane waiting at Stockholm Arlanda Airport. Markus, Carl, and Jakob tried their best to conceal their excitement as they hopped in a cab to the airport and the American millionaire’s waiting jet. At three thirty the next morning, they stumbled out of the nightclub in London and got on the first available flight home to Stockholm. They got about an hour’s sleep before it was time for the next meeting at the office.

“I feel like James Bond,” wrote Markus on his blog the following day.

Over the summer, Markus and Elin found time to get married. The couple was traditionally attired at the wedding, but Markus kept his black fedora on. Mojang celebrated with a “wedding weekend,” during which each person who bought Minecraft got a free copy “to give to someone you love.”

The publicity surrounding Minecraft also meant that other companies began to contact them. Before GDC, cell phone manufacturer Sony Ericsson had asked them to find time for a meeting while at the conference. On-site in San Francisco, three representatives from Mojang found themselves in an air-conditioned conference room with four directors from Sony Ericsson, discussing a Minecraft version for the Swedish-Japanese company’s cell phones. Seated around the table were Carl; Daniel Kaplan, Mojang’s business developer; and programmer Aron Nieminen, recently hired to develop a Minecraft cell phone app.

Among the others at Mojang, Aron is known as “the smart one.” In a company almost completely composed of programmers, it’s a significant title. He and Markus got to know each other at Midasplayer, where they worked together on a couple of games. Even then, Markus had noticed Aron’s head for math, which made him an unusually fast and effective programmer. When Mojang decided to develop a cell phone version of Minecraft, Markus sought out and recruited his old colleague for the task. Aron is also known for his knitted wool cap, which he wears indoors, outdoors, and at meetings with top directors of big corporations, such as the one he now found himself in.

The Sony Ericsson bosses laid their cards on the table. Later that year, the company would be releasing the Xperia PLAY cell phone, which is specially adapted for games. The Swedish-Japanese company was hard pressed by the competition, and that many Swedes continued to buy their cell phones was poor consolation when Sony Ericsson was losing its grip on the world market. The company heads had a good reason to curse out Apple in particular, whose iPhone had, in just a few years, become the phone everyone wanted. They needed a new start and a big hit, especially among younger buyers.

Mojang had something the directors of Sony Ericsson desperately needed: a cool game that everyone was talking about. What could be better to spark interest for their new gadget than a special version of Minecraft? If Mojang would consider developing the game, Sony Ericsson would gladly pay well for it, the directors told them. The only problem was time. Xperia PLAY would be premiered at the E3 Expo, barely three months away. Would it be possible to put together anything at all, even a playable demo, by then?

The other people in the room turned to Aron, who’d been sitting quietly in his cap, listening. He had only been working at Mojang for a couple of days. Before GDC, there hadn’t been time for him to take even an initial look at the code that ran Minecraft. Now he would have less than ninety days to write a completely new version of the game, more or less from the ground up and for hardware that hadn’t been released yet. Was it even worth a try? The young math genius leaned back in his chair and glanced up at the ceiling. Carl figured that he was calculating silently to himself. The directors of Sony Ericsson cast uneasy looks at one another. A couple of quiet seconds later, Aron looked down from the ceiling toward the others seated around the table.

“Okay, it’ll work,” he said.

Three months later, at the E3 Expo in Los Angeles, Carl looked on contentedly as Sony Ericsson exhibited Minecraft as the big news of the year, complete with a TV ad campaign in which the comedienne Kristen Schaal presented the game. “I made my face out of diamonds once and I passed out because it was so gorgeous,” she said.

One of Carl’s sharpest memories from E3 was when he stood at the top of an escalator and looked out over the showroom floor of the expo. Below him, a huge crowd milled around. He wondered at first where they were going, what new game was being shown that was drawing so many people. Then he caught a glimpse of a familiar black hat in the middle of the crowd. People had swarmed to Markus, who was trying to make his way across the show floor. The creator of Minecraft had become a superstar. E3 was the last time Markus moved about at a conference without a bodyguard at his side.

People who were in Markus’s vicinity at this time describe him as happier than ever. But they also remember how the commotion stressed him out. With success always comes responsibilities, and with their big breakthrough, the Mojang guys were forced into making big, businesslike decisions for the first time. Often, they went against the playful, perhaps somewhat naive profile they most wanted associated with themselves and their company. At the E3 Expo, Mojang reached an agreement with Microsoft to develop a version of Minecraft for the Xbox 360. From a business perspective, the decision was a no-brainer. Around the world, there were close to 70 million Xbox 360 players. Microsoft also runs the online service Xbox Live Arcade, one of the most successful online game stores and the main source of income for thousands of indie game developers. Everyone involved expected Minecraft sales to get a huge shove toward the stratosphere when the Xbox version was released in May 2012. Carl would be able to add another couple of million to Mojang’s already glowing revenue forecast.

On the other hand, it’s difficult not to be reminded of the exact same world of corporate big business that Markus had done everything so far to avoid. The Xbox version of Minecraft was not developed by Mojang, but under license at the Scottish developer 4J Studios. The game was simplified and adapted to appeal to the broader, less geeky audience that Microsoft wants to reach. Specifically, the mystique around the crafting of tools and new minerals would be gone. The absence of documentation of exactly how different things are built in Minecraft was one of the most important reasons that such a large and living online community grew around the game. In the Xbox version, with the simple press of a key, the player can access a guide with all possible combinations laid out on the screen.

Markus also had to promise not to speak as openly about the Xbox or Xperia versions of Minecraft as he’d done with his own earlier version of the game. His constant presence in the community had been a huge factor in the success of the game, but now he was to keep quiet about the details. The reason? Both Microsoft and Sony Ericsson paid for marketing the game and wanted control over what information would reach the public and how.

That particular promise is typical of the dilemmas that now plagued Mojang. Carl mentions accessibility and closeness to players as two of the company’s greatest strengths. But now, interest in Minecraft was so enormous that its creator risked drowning in it. Every day, hundreds, perhaps thousands of questions, opinions, and suggestions inundate Markus. How do you maintain a close relationship with 20 million people?

A part of the solution is named Lydia Winters, online better known by her handle, Minecraftchick. In most contexts, she is completely unknown, whether she takes a walk in Stockholm or in her hometown of Saint Petersburg, Florida. But online, Minecraftchick is something of a phenomenon. Lydia belongs to the same group of Internet celebrities as The Yogscast and Captain Sparklez, but while others are praised for their impressive constructions or theatrics in the game, Lydia has made a name for herself thanks to her personality.

More than 60,000 people subscribe to her video blog on YouTube, where she posts a new video clip each week on a Minecraft theme. The most popular, where she explains the difference between various monsters in the world of Minecraft, has been viewed more than 800,000 times.

References to Minecraft run as a constant thread through Lydia’s films and blog entries, but like many prominent bloggers, she has realized the value of letting her own personality permeate everything she does. The viewer who follows Lydia on YouTube learns more about her thoughts, views, and moods than he or she does about Minecraft. This is an extremely conscious choice. Her motto is to be personal and invite viewers into a dialogue. In her first films, she made a point of mentioning by name everyone who had written or commented on her earlier ones.

Lydia has always wanted to be a celebrity. As a child, she dreamed of becoming a singer or an actor. Growing up, she harbored ambitions of becoming a renowned photographer. Instead it was, more or less by chance, a peculiar game developed in Sweden that made her famous. In the autumn of 2010, Lydia’s doctor informed her that she had an increased risk of developing breast cancer. She decided to start fund-raising for cancer research and started a campaign called “f/stop breast cancer,” after the word for the aperture setting on a camera lens. The intention was for photographers to auction off mentorships and course time and donate the proceedings to research. To drum up interest, Lydia recorded her own video addressing the photographers she admired in which she talked about her plan and asked them to join the campaign. She also created a challenge: if she could raise at least $10,000, she would shave off her hair in front of the camera.

“F/stop breast cancer” became a talking point in the photography world. When it came time to tally the funds, Lydia found that she had raised more than $20,000. The YouTube clip where Lydia shaves off her hair has been viewed, as this book is being written, more than 90,000 times.

“I realized that things I did with video just worked,” she says.

The breast cancer campaign taught Lydia the basics of how you attract attention on the Internet: be real, and find a gimmick. It also gave her an appetite for more of life as an Internet celebrity. If a film where she shaves off her hair could get so much attention, she thought, maybe she could turn it into a career? She decided to start her own YouTube channel. The only question was what the clips would be about. Lydia thought long and hard before some friends suggested Minecraft. It was a game she barely knew of, but that, according to what she had heard, was undoubtedly the next big thing on the web.

Two things made Lydia unique in the world she now entered: she is a woman, which is still relatively rare among gaming enthusiasts on YouTube; and she had never played Minecraft before. Her first films would be about how she took her first, shaky steps in the game. While others uploaded films of their most daring breakneck accomplishments and impressive buildings, she made entertainment out of her lack of experience. Her hair hadn’t grown back out after the fund-raising campaign, and she’d bought a shocking-pink wig that she always put on before she turned on the camera. It swiftly became synonymous with the brand name Minecraftchick.

For Minecraftchick is just that: a brand name. Lydia didn’t start playing Minecraft because she thought the game was fun. Rather, she understood the power and potential of connecting her name early on with a phenomenon that was exploding into popularity.

“I’ve always liked attention. Deep down, I believe, most people are like that. Having people read what I write and watch my films is a real kick,” she says.

She had her first contact with Mojang just before the Swedes went to the E3 Expo. Lydia had contacted Carl, introduced herself, and asked if there was anything she could do to help. Most of all, she was trying to get a filmed interview with Markus. A chat with Notch would be a real scoop in the Minecraft world, and if she succeeded, her viewer ratings on YouTube would most likely skyrocket. The release with Sony Ericsson meant that Mojang needed all the help they could get, and Carl asked if she could stand in their shared booth. She would rave about how fantastically well Minecraft worked on the Swedish-Japanese cell phones.

When she arrived, Lydia noticed with disappointment that Markus didn’t even seem to know who she was. He was surrounded by so many people that it felt hopeless to ask for an interview. But Carl saw her natural demeanor when speaking to people and offered her a job on the spot, on the condition that she would move to Stockholm.

“Only companies that don’t have a community hire a community manager,” said Carl, when asked about the job. So, Lydia was given the title Director of Fun. Even so, her job essentially entails taking care of the community that has grown around Minecraft. She was given the tasks of speaking with players on social media, organizing events, and being the company’s public face.

No one who has seen Lydia speak in public can question her suitability for the job, but maybe her position at Mojang is also somewhat symptomatic. She was recruited because Markus, Jakob, Jens, and Carl don’t have time to do what they themselves actually described as one of their most important jobs.

Jeff Bezos, the man who founded Amazon.com and one of the Internet business community’s most influential people, has coined the expression “two-pizza team.” That’s a measure of how large a company that lives on creativity and new ideas should allow itself to become. If a project group needs more than two pizzas to feed it, meaning between five and seven people, then it’s too large, says Bezos. In a larger team, creativity and flow of ideas are limited and replaced with bickering and internal politics.

During the spring of 2012, Mojang hired its sixteenth employee.

As the millions rolled in and the number of Minecraft players grew that winter, these issues increasingly consumed Markus, Carl, and Jakob’s time. How do you become a big company without becoming a big company?

There wasn’t much in the numbers that was cause for worry, though. Mojang’s revenue kept growing at an astonishing rate. From September 17, 2010, when the company was founded, to December 31, 2011, Mojang brought in a total of $78,722,300. Not too shabby, but for competitors and investors keeping an eye on Mojang, it was the company’s profit margin that really impressed. Mojang’s costs for the period were just over $8.7 million, including overhead. The remainder, more than $69 million, was pure profit. Markus’s own company, Notch Development, directly received $60 million of it in license fees.

In the last few years, the whole Internet world has talked about the valuation of the new generation of Internet companies, defined as the sum an investor can reasonably be expected to pay for all the shares in a company. In other words, what the founders would get if they sold their company. The existing climate on the market has meant that Internet companies are often valued at ridiculous amounts of money, mainly based on projected future potential. Which means that even companies that are not particularly profitable can have a high value if investors agree that they are likely to earn big money in the near future. The most well known example is Facebook, which was valued at the dizzying sum of $104 billion when it went public on the NASDAQ. The euphoria was subdued, however, when the newly introduced stock plummeted during the first days of trading. Calamity howlers began to talk about a bubble bursting.

Since Mojang has never taken onboard any investors, it’s difficult to put an exact value for the company. But looking at other prominent Internet companies gives a good estimate. Zynga was valued at close to $9 billion when it went public. That is twenty-five times more than the company’s profits, which were just over $285 million at the time. According to investors, a valuation of between twenty and fifty times the profit margin would not be unfeasible with a company such as Mojang. Using that model to calculate its market value if sold, Mojang would have a price tag of between $1.5 and $4 billion.

Carl just shakes his head when numbers like these are mentioned. And perhaps there are more down-to-earth ways to measure how successful Minecraft has become than listening to the financial world’s overly optimistic calculations. One way is to take a closer look at who is actually playing Minecraft, because the game is now used for much more than just entertainment. The best example of this is found on the other side of the Baltic Sea, deep in Finnish Karelia.

Chapter 13

More than a Game

The small Finnish town of Joensuu is located more than 200 miles northeast of Helsinki, barely an hour’s drive from the Russian border. Most of the city’s life revolves around the university there, one of Finland’s largest, with more than fifteen thousand students. In the autumn of 2010, Santeri Koivisto was attending a teacher-training program there. He was almost twenty-five years old and had bigger plans for his career than becoming just another teacher in town.

One of his ideas was to combine two of his biggest interests, computer games and education. In academic language, it’s called game-based learning, a relatively new branch of education theory. Koivisto was fascinated by the thought of trying to harness the powerful attraction that computer games have on children and using it in the classroom.

The idea wasn’t original. Many before Koivisto had tried to introduce games into schools to help increase students’ interest. The concept of “edutainment,” a cross between education and entertainment, was coined during the 1980s, when game developers realized that parents preferred to buy their children games that were educational as well as entertaining. In the nineties, boxes full of edutainment titles were sold, featuring popular animated characters that taught spelling, math, and history.

But Koivisto was far from impressed by what he’d seen so far. Messy math games and elementary vocabulary tests had nothing in common with the games that students played in their free time. It hardly felt worth the effort to investigate which of the existing games actually had an educational benefit. They were missing the most important thing of all—they were simply no fun.

In the winter of 2011, Koivisto read an article about Minecraft in the Finnish game magazine Pelit. He downloaded the game, installed it, and tried it out. Like so many others, he encountered a world where you could swiftly build pretty much anything. Just as typical, he couldn’t put his finger on what the objective was.

But for an aspiring teacher in search of a game to take into the classroom, the lack of a goal and instructions was not disadvantageous. Koivisto saw Minecraft’s potential and decided to experiment with the game as a learning tool. He just had to find a class where the kids, parents, and school leadership would approve.

Just a little later, while winter still had Finland in an iron grip, he got a chance to put his ideas into practice. Outside of his studies, Koivisto sometimes worked as a substitute teacher in nearby Kontiolahti. One day, he stood in front of a class of ten-year-olds and asked if any of them had heard of Minecraft. Almost every hand flew up. Koivisto remembers in particular that almost as many girls as boys knew of Minecraft—something that could not be said of most computer games.

What Minecraft could contribute to the classroom experience was less than obvious. Finding something that the students are fond of isn’t difficult, and neither is knowing what they need to learn. A teacher’s challenge is to combine the two, and Koivisto was convinced that games in the classroom would be a way to succeed.

He explains his reasoning when we meet with him during a visit in Stockholm. In short, it’s based on dissatisfaction with how most teachers run their classrooms today. “Most of them believe that students learn whatever the teacher writes on the whiteboard,” he says.

Koivisto disagrees, and with that, he takes a stand in a pivotal question about how effective educational methods actually work. He speaks about the antiquated belief that children’s brains absorb everything they are exposed to.

“Many teachers pile as much information as possible in front of their students and hope it goes in,” he says. Koivisto recommends discussion and experimentation instead, letting students proceed by trial and error until they get results. Children can only learn when their brains are active, such as when they are actively discussing a subject or when they are totally attentive, like they are when trying to succeed in a game. Many would disagree, but it’s clear that Minecraft fit very well into Koivisto’s vision of how education should function.

In the classroom, Koivisto watched as the ten-year-olds clicked around, concentrating on the Minecraft world that he had built for them. There was still no version of the game designed for teaching, and each lesson had to be improvised using the standard version of the game. In the back of his mind, Koivisto began sketching larger plans.

Around the same time, Joel Levin was walking down West Ninety-Third Street in New York, on his way to work. He was a teacher at Columbia Grammar and Preparatory School in Manhattan, a private school near the city’s most exclusive addresses on Central Park West. He taught computer skills to elementary school kids, and this spring, he wanted to try something new. After the winter break, he usually gave the students a new exercise using tools he found and liked on the Internet. The previous year, it had been Google Earth, and the lesson had been in geography. That wasn’t his main area of expertise, but by letting the pupils learn about how to find countries with the help of the Internet, he made sure they would get their computer skills honed in the process.

Levin had been playing Minecraft for a few months, often at home in his apartment in uptown Manhattan, where he lived with his wife and two daughters, one and four years old. His first attempt at the game had gone so-so. He’d connected to an unmoderated game server and found himself in a world full of gigantic penis constructions and smashed castles. You couldn’t even begin building before someone turned up and destroyed what you’d started or swiftly refashioned your creation into an impressive male organ of dirt and stone. It could have been worse, Levin reasoned. At least his kids hadn’t been there to see it.

But he did have them with him later, when he’d found better servers to play on. His four-year-old daughter, Ellie, soon developed her own Minecraft habits. She navigated the game herself, but turned it over to dad for more complicated building, which he completed according to her instructions. The monsters were scary, so she asked him to turn them off in “the world game,” as she called Minecraft.

One of his daughter’s first solo projects in Minecraft was to build a tree house.

“You need to remember that we live in New York City. As long as she lives here, she will probably never build a real one,” says Joel Levin.

The thought of using Minecraft in school had taken root in Joel’s mind at the same time that Santeri Koivisto was making his plans in Finland. Levin’s ambitions were initially humble. If nothing else, he thought, Minecraft could teach the students to use a mouse and keyboard. The blocky and relatively simple Minecraft world would be a suitable first step into a 3-D environment. If they wanted to build more complicated constructions, they would need to get out onto the web and learn more. During the first week, maybe he would give them the task of building their own stone pickaxes.

He brought the game to school on a chilly day early in the spring semester. His intention was to experiment with Minecraft for a couple of weeks, to see what it contributed to his classes and if the students learned anything. Minecraft remained a component of computer class for the rest of the year. The earliest lessons were no more complicated than giving the children the task of building something according to his instructions. Once they had learned to navigate and complete the simplest kind of building, the task was to go online and find information about how a certain material or tool could be made.

During another class, Levin built a golden pyramid that the kids could only get into if they helped solve a puzzle. Inside the golden pyramid were tiny, pixel-built ancient treasures. The first students to solve the puzzles and get to the treasures of course wanted to pick them up and escape with their loot. But Levin, noticeably proud, recounts the discussion that sprang up in the classroom. If you were to find antique objects in real life, he asked his students, would you just take them? Without having been there, it’s impossible to say if it was really the kids’ own idea, but Joel Levin says that, after some deliberation, his students finally arrived at the decision to build a museum, safeguarding the treasures instead of committing digital grave robbery.

Levin was worried that parents would think he was wasting their children’s time playing unnecessary games in school. He was careful to limit Minecraft to being strictly a part of the curriculum, and even wrote a letter to the parents asking them not to buy their own copies of the game for home, at least not yet. Minecraft would be something that the kids did during class.

“In the beginning, I needed an excuse to use the game. It’s not that way anymore.”

Back to Karelia. Santeri Koivisto didn’t really know where his experiment would lead, but the school principal had been positive about him trying out the new game in class. In contrast, to his colleagues at the university he was basically a laughing stock. Most of them thought it was a terrible idea, and even his adviser recommended he abandon the project. And yet, his students liked their new tool. The only thing left for Koivisto to do now was convince everyone else. After unveiling his plans at the annual Joensuu science fair, Sci-Fest, a discussion began online about introducing Minecraft into the schools. One of those who discovered what was happening in Finland was Joel Levin in New York. Another was Carl Manneh in Stockholm.

Most people who are sure they’ve had a stroke of genius are terribly disappointed when they find out that someone else has already discovered the same thing. That’s exactly what happened to Santeri Koivisto when the teacher at the private school in Manhattan e-mailed him and enthusiastically described what he’d been doing in his own classroom. Once Koivisto’s disappointment over not being unique had passed, the two of them proceeded to talk about the possibilities of collaboration.

They immediately agreed on a few points. Minecraft must be adapted to teachers’ classroom needs in order to work well in schools. The world the students scampered around in had to be controllable, the monsters would have to be taken out, and they needed a way for teachers to supervise specific tasks, or else the project would never amount to more than unusually entertaining lessons for those kids who were already devoted gamers. The game needed to be rewritten and that wouldn’t be possible without help from Mojang. This would turn out to be easier than they imagined. Once they got in touch, Carl Manneh immediately jumped onboard, asked them to start planning, and drafted up a reseller license agreement, the first and only one that exists for Minecraft. Carl’s only condition was that the new version of Minecraft wouldn’t just be about education, because then it wouldn’t be fun.

The Minecraft code needed to be chopped up and reconfigured into a version where the teacher could control what happened in the game. Santeri Koivisto convinced Aleksi Postari, an IT student in his twenties, to spend his summer modifying the game. The custom mod he developed was given the academic-sounding name MinecraftEdu. The retail agreement with Mojang gave Koivisto a few euros for each copy sold and he began traveling around to schools, introducing MinecraftEdu to teachers and training those who wanted to try it for themselves. Santeri and Aleksi handled the transactions with their newly founded company, TeacherGaming, and brought on Joel Levin as a partner. At that point, the two Finnish students had never met the teacher from Manhattan in person. TeacherGaming board meetings were held via Skype or on a chat forum. None of them had met Carl either, or anyone else at Mojang.

Initially, Santeri Koivisto had no idea what his experiment with Minecraft in schools would lead to. Maybe he could add a couple of conclusions to his thesis or maybe just make a little money, he thought.

“Now I wake up in the morning and I’ve sold fifteen hundred dollars’ worth of licenses. You realize that, yes, it might turn into something big,” he says, and smiles a little awkwardly.

MinecraftEdu was an unusual success among educational games. In just the few first months after starting out, TeacherGaming sold Minecraft to enough schools to reach more than 100,000 students. At first it was just Finnish schools, but now there are teachers in Great Britain, the United States, Australia, and China using the game. By meeting with teachers in Minecraft, Santeri Koivisto and Joel Levin are able to hold courses where they demonstrate the possibilities that the game has to offer.

It isn’t easy to explain why so many teachers have adopted Minecraft. The question of whether computer games contribute anything to instruction is even more difficult to answer. For the uninitiated, it sounds strange—playing games is something children do in their free time, isn’t it? Hundreds of teachers the world over disagree, instead finding games a valuable learning tool for their students.

To find an explanation, we need to consider Minecraft’s open-ended design, which lets teachers quickly build up the surroundings they need for particular lessons. Some of the first experiments in Finnish schools tried to show how deserts are created when trees are chopped down, a process that isn’t very difficult to simulate in Minecraft. Other teachers have experimented with building models of molecules with Minecraft blocks. Obviously, the same thing can be achieved using other tools, but if kids feel more at home in Minecraft than with plastic models, why not meet them on home ground?

We find a similar example in the shabby, gray concrete giants of the Swedish government’s housing projects in Stockholm’s suburbs. Many of these properties, developed in the sixties and seventies, are now badly in need of renovation. Politicians argue over the best way to finance the task and about how the areas should look when finished. And there’s at least as much squabbling about how the tenants in these areas will be able have their say in the design of their buildings, parks, and streets. Through an initiative of the company Svensk Byggtjänst, property owners in Fisksätra, Nacka, and Södertälje, south of Stockholm, have used Minecraft to help them solve these problems. The project was introduced under the name “My neighborhood.” A Minecraft server was created, accessible to anyone. With the help of Mojang, Svensk Byggtjänst contacted experienced Minecraft builders, who began to construct a typical Swedish mass-produced suburb inside the game. Everything in it is made of the typical Minecraft blocks, which makes it easy to hack away pieces and put them somewhere else. Thus, one part of the neighborhood can get a makeover or one building can be torn down and replaced with another.

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.

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.

“Sometimes I wish I could change my name and go somewhere and hide.”

Those who savor Schadenfreude can find plenty of material in tales like these; they usually end with the winners or someone close to them dying. But they don’t change a basic fact of wealth—the research does confirm that we humans become happier when we have a large sum of money in the bank.

For Markus, the money was not rolling in as fast as it does for a lottery winner, but things happened quickly when the media got a whiff of the mysterious Notch and his millions. From being just a popular indie developer, in just a few months’ time he became one of Sweden’s most discussed individuals. Patiently, he answered the journalists’ questions. No, he hadn’t been blinded by the money. No, he hadn’t spent it all on craziness.

When we speak with people close to Markus, they all maintain that the riches haven’t changed him. Some say that it’s because of his choice of friends; he has few instead of many, and most of them are slightly obsessive game developers rather than expensive-cocktail-drinking jet-setters. Others point out that Markus’s success came gradually, over the period of a few years. A third explanation is that Markus’s family has always kept him grounded. It would be a lie, however, to say that he’s never been tempted by conspicuous consumption.

For instance, there was the time he sat at his computer, randomly surfing the web while taking a break from programming. On a shopping site he had stumbled upon, he saw a watch he liked. It had a classic design, really sharp. And best of all, he could afford it. He called Elin, who looked over his shoulder at the screen.

Elin was silent for a while, looking at the price tag: $114,000.00.

“Markus, it’s a watch. A watch.”

After a short discussion, the purchase was averted. Markus realized that a gadget he would never dare wear was worthless anyway.

Many articles written about Markus’s sudden wealth are about how it doesn’t seem to have changed his behavior. He showed up for interviews in the same hat and clothes as before. One article mentions that he seemed to have been shopping on the way to the interview; the reporter noted that his bag was from Dressmann, a popular low-price chain in Sweden. But to a certain extent, Markus’s spartan lifestyle is a myth. He and Elin have moved into an exclusive residence in central Stockholm.

In the spring of 2011, Markus began talking about taking his family on a trip. He needed a break from working on Minecraft. His sister, Anna, had been talking about taking her youngest daughter on a flight for the first time, maybe to Turkey, a destination that was within her budget thanks to the charter flights to the coast. Instead, Markus booked a private jet to Paris. When the plane took off, Markus’s mother, Ritva, and Anna, accompanied by kids and fiancé, were aboard, along with Elin and her mother. After a few days of sightseeing and shopping, they flew home. When the plane was in the air, Markus leaned over to his sister, as far as the seatbelt would allow.

“Is this fun?” he asked.

The question might seem strange, but Anna saw that her answer was important to Markus. The money that had dropped into his lap would, first and foremost, make it possible for him and his family to have fun. He needed an answer.

“Yes, this is fun,” said Anna.

Five years had passed since Markus’s sister had kicked her drug habit. Her path had been via therapy, a new partner, and children. She continued to go to AA meetings. Her job as a care assistant didn’t pay very well, but she could live on what she earned. Now she was sitting back, gazing through the window of a private jet, on the way home from a trip to Paris.

The Mojang team at MineCon 2011 in Las Vegas, just before the opening ceremony. To the right, Markus's sister Anna Hemming. Photo by Elin Zetterstrand.

Anna and Markus have an agreement when it comes to how he shares his wealth. She has promised never to beg for money from her brother. Of course, she’ll gladly accept gifts, but it must always be Markus’s initiative. Part of it is that she’s afraid she’ll become greedy and the money will destroy their relationship. Besides, she got herself clean and off the streets all by herself, not with the help of a rich relative. When she began to get her life together, the condition of her teeth remained visible evidence of her troubled past. But instead of strewing money over his sister, Markus paid her dental bills.

In less private contexts, Markus’s fortune is a hot topic of speculation. Everyone who knows his background knows how important gaming is to him, and to developers, the thought that his money might finance other independent game is titillating. As a patron, Markus’s millions would go far in bankrolling promising-but-broke developers. Besides, the money would be funneled back into the world Markus was a part of and perhaps form the foundation of future success stories. That’s why many were overjoyed when he sent out a signal in early 2012 suggesting he was going to do just that.

It all began when famous game developer Tim Schafer wrote a few lines about wanting to do a follow-up to his game Psychonauts. Psychonauts had been released in 2005 and had been widely acclaimed by reviewers. Schafer, who in the nineties had worked at LucasArts on classic adventure games such as The Secret of Monkey Island, Day of the Tentacle, Grim Fandango, and Full Throttle, was already a legend in the gaming world. He was praised for his singular sense of humor and his ingenious way of telling stories with his games.

Even today, many people maintain that Psychonauts is one of the best games ever made. Markus is one of them. But Psychonauts was a commercial flop. Majesco, the publisher, lost a lot of money on it, and its CEO was forced to resign shortly thereafter. Among players who know their history, Psychonauts is a popular example of the moneyed publishers’ total disinterest in games with artistic ambitions. Indie developers in a bad mood like to point to it as proof of the unfairness of the world.

Now, Schafer says, he would like to make a sequel. To do that, he would need “a few million dollars.” With the memory of its predecessor’s miserable sales still fresh, he understood that the chance of anyone financing his project was minimal. Until Markus piped up and openly tweeted, “Let’s make Psychonauts 2 happen.” Everyone knew he could afford it, and what would be more beautiful than to use Minecraft’s millions to give new life to a classic game? The gaming world was in a whirlwind over the story. We meet with Markus a few days later. He’s already explained that the financing of Psychonauts 2 won’t happen. It turned out to be significantly more expensive than he’d expected, more money than the sequel could reasonably earn back in sales. Mojang is not interested in charity.

“There’s no purely altruistic help-others spirit,” says Markus, but quickly adds that he would like to invest in promising games. Cobalt, for example. Cobalt is a classic platform game that Mojang took under its wing shortly after the company was founded. Markus wants to do more of that. He’d rather Mojang act as a mother ship for game developers with great ideas but empty bank accounts than employ five hundred people.

Just before MineCon, Markus had decided to invite his family along, for the trip of their lives. Anna, Ritva, and Markus’s father, Birger, would each receive a plane ticket to Las Vegas. It would be one of the few times since Anna and Markus were teenagers that the whole family would be in the same place at the same time. The siblings recall that Birger was withdrawn during the whole stay. Markus had pleaded with his father before the trip. He was welcome to come, Markus told him, but only as long as he stayed drug-free. “I love you,” Markus said when he invited him. “But I can’t talk to you when you’re high.”

When the fans left his son alone for a short while, Birger told him he was proud and happy about what Markus had accomplished. But Birger had come directly to Las Vegas from the countryside of Hälsingland, so he also admitted that it was alarming to be among so many people. Maybe it was hard for him to come to terms with the fact that everyone was there to see Markus. Birger saw how the fans swarmed around his son, the boy who hadn’t been able to tear himself away from the Commodore 128 at home in Salem twenty years earlier. The Commodore 128 they’d both spent so much time together on before their relationship deteriorated.

MineCon ended with a giant party in classic Las Vegas style. Deadmau5 stood in the DJ booth. One of the world’s most acclaimed house producers, he plays Minecraft himself when he isn’t busy getting sold-out arenas full of people up and dancing. Great Britain’s Prince Harry was seen in the vicinity, which got game bloggers wondering if even royalty had come to love the shy Swede’s creation. At one point during the party, Anna turned to her brother.

“You did it, Markus. You really did it.”

When the family woke up the next day, only one thing remained to be done. A long time ago, Markus made his sister a promise that someday he would get rich and celebrate it by taking the family on a helicopter ride. Markus lay exhausted in bed, but Anna, Ritva, and Birger went down to the hotel lobby and into a waiting car. Still tired from yesterday’s festivities, they boarded the helicopter and flew out over the Grand Canyon.

Markus and Anna have thought a lot about what their father said and did during those days in Vegas. They both noticed that he was quiet and withdrawn, but thought it was just because he was overwhelmed. During the last few years, he’d lived far from both of his children and city life. Now he saw his son greeted like a rock star. Anna describes Birger as impressed by what he saw, but also as worn-out. The siblings knew that his most recent drug-free period had, like so many times before, ended in relapse. It would turn out to be his last.

Around a month later, they received word that Birger had committed suicide at home in his village in Hälsingland.

Chapter 16

Back to the Boys’ Room

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.”

Photographs

A replica of the Eiffel Tower in Paris, built on the popular FyreUK server. By FyreUK (www.fyreuk.com) (www.youtube.com/user/fyreuk)

High Rossferry, a city of skyscrapers, bridges, and parks built entirely in Minecraft. By Dydtor and Darkone (www.highrossferry.blogspot.com) (www.youtube.com/user/highrossferrycity)

The city is surrounded by water and connected to the mainland by bridges. The architecture is inspired by US cities such as New York and Chicago. By Dydtor and Darkone (www.highrossferry.blogspot.com) (www.youtube.com/user/highrossferrycity)

A beachfront village with an ark, inspired by the biblical story of Noah. Built in survival mode on the Mindcrack server. By BdoubleO (www.youtube.com/bdoubleo100) and Guude (www.youtube.com/guudeboulderfist) http://www.youtube.com/bdoubleo100

A wizard’s castle and an eastern-style palace, with lava curtains activated on a day/night cycle. Built in survival mode on the Mindcrack server. By Arkas (www.youtube.com/arkasmc) and W92baj (www.youtube.com/w92baj)

Fully functioning soda machine. Dispenses various cleverly named potions for the player. By SethBling (www.youtube.com/user/sethbling) (twitter.com/SethBling)

An accurate, working guitar. The player plays individual notes or chords by fingering the correct frets and strumming. By SethBling (www.youtube.com/user/sethbling) (twitter.com/SethBling

A fleet of ships traveling through space, part of a series of space-themed maps. By The VoxelBox (www.youtube.com/voxelboxvideos) (www.twitter.com/voxelbox)

A shrine built in the fantasy world of Nefret’Mizir, influenced architecturally by Persian styles and colors. By The VoxelBox (www.youtube.com/voxelboxvideos) (www.twitter.com/voxelbox)

A temple built to resemble “Notch,” the creator of Minecraft. Will dispatch various items to the player. By Disco (www.youtube.com/fvdisco)

A fully playable Minecraft-remake of the classic ’90s video game Sonic the Hedgehog. By Disco (www.youtube.com/fvdisco)

A modern-style manor built in a small valley. The design is based around straight lines and cubic forms, with lots of open windows to maximize light. By Aurelien Sama (www.youtube.com/user/AurelienSama) (twitter.com/Aurelien_Sama)

An organic cathedral made out of mountains and trees. By Aurelien Sama (www.youtube.com/user/AurelienSama) (twitter.com/Aurelien_Sama)

A volcano built on a tropical island, with several canyons and ravines. By Aurelien Sama (www.youtube.com/user/AurelienSama) (twitter.com/Aurelien_Sama)

Herobrine’s mansion, a popular adventure map with boss fights and customized monsters. By Hypixel and Gazamo (www.hypixel.net)

Herobrine’s Origins, an adventure map that uses redstone to present the player with challenges and puzzles. By Hypixel and Mithrintia (www.hypixel.net)

Sources

This book would not have been possible to write without the help of everyone who sat down with us for long, openhearted interviews. This story is based first and foremost upon the memories of Markus Persson, as well as on those of his family, friends, earlier employers, and coworkers, who have all taken time to speak with us. Thanks are in order to all of them.

When possible, descriptions and statements in this book have been validated by several people. Where nothing else is indicated in the text, quotes and information come from one of these interviews, conducted during 2011 and 2012.

Chapter 1. Three, Two, One . . .

The information about MineCon comes mostly from our trip to the conference in November 2011, supplemented with interviews of employees at Mojang and others who were there. The event is furthermore well documented on the Internet. Innumerable YouTube clips have helped us to document what we missed when we were on-site. Information about the total numbers of visitors and such comes mainly from Mojang’s own documentation.

Chapter 2. For Beginners

The examples of impressive constructions in Minecraft all come from publicly available pictures and film clips on the Internet. There are too many of them on the web to mention. A search on YouTube will turn up the constructions we mention and many more.

Chapter 3. “Do You Want Me to Feel Sorry

for You or Something?”

The information about Markus Persson’s childhood and youth comes mainly from interviews with Markus Persson, his family, and his coworkers. The documentary film Klassliv by Noomi Liljefors and Caroline Mörner, broadcast on Swedish television in 1998, tells of the high school class in Tumba where Markus Persson’s sister, Anna Hemming, went. The film helped us to describe the apartment in Salem and Anna’s teen years.

Chapter 4. Games Worth Billions

Numbers and statistics about the game industry come from the industry’s organization, ESA (Entertainment Software Association) as well as from the companies referenced. Statistics on the music industry come from their organization, IFPI (International Federation of the Phonographic Industry). For more facts, we recommend the Swedish video game industry trade group, Dataspelsbranschen, and their superb reports.

Karl Magnus Troedsson, CEO at DICE, and Lars Markgren, CEO at Midasplayer, have both been interviewed about the game industry in general and their respective companies in particular.

Chapter 5. “They Just Don’t Get It”

Information about Markus Persson’s and Jakob Porser’s time at Midasplayer comes from interviews with them both and with people in their vicinity at the time. Rolf Jansson, Lars Markgren, and Markus’s wife, Elin Zetterstrand, have all contributed with their own memories of that period.

Chapter 6. Macho Men with Big Guns

Erik Svedäng, Nicklas Nygren, Jonatan Söderström, and Jens Bergensten have all been interviewed about the Swedish indie games scene and No More Sweden. The book The Ultimate History of Video Games, by Steven L. Kent, is a very thorough run-through of the early history of the games industry. Those who want to learn more about Swedish IT history are also encouraged to read our own nonfiction book, Svenska Hackare, published in Swedish by Norstedts förlag in 2011.

Chapter 7. “This Is Way Too Much Fun. I Built a Bridge.”

Information about the sources of inspiration behind Minecraft comes from interviews with Markus Persson. Zachary Barth, the creator of Infiniminer, was interviewed about his view of the game’s success. The early reactions to Minecraft were found in discussions on the TIGSource forum (forums.tigsource.com), where the first version of the game was released. Ritva Persson and Jakob Porser’s memories from that time have also been of great assistance.

Chapter 8. The Hedonic Hot Spot of the Brain

Quotes and information from Simone Kühn come partly from an interview with her and partly from her research report on video gamers and their brains. The report is titled, “The Neural Basis of Video Gaming” and is published on www.nature.com. In spite of the fact that it’s an academic paper intended for researchers, it’s also interesting reading for laymen.

The book Trigger Happy by Steven Poole is an excellent introduction for those who are looking for a deeper understanding of computer games, and it has been of great help to us. It is now available as a download, free of charge, on stevenpoole.net. There is an abundance of more academically oriented books on the subject, for example, An Introduction to Game Studies by Frans Mäyrä. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi develops his theory of flow in, among others, the books Finding Flow and Beyond Boredom and Anxiety.

Chapter 9. “Yes, You Should Buy This Game.”

Numbers concerning sales of Minecraft come from Mojang’s own data. Via https://minecraft.net, you can follow the number of sold copies of the game in real time. Markus Persson’s visit to Valve in the United States was re-created with the help of his own, Elin Zetterstrand’s, and Jakob Porser’s recollections.

Chapter 10. The Squid Situation

The visit to Ljunggrens Restaurant has been described to us in interviews with those who were there. Scenes from Mojang’s office were recounted by, among others, Jens Bergensten, Carl Manneh, Jakob Porser, and Markus Persson. In addition, we’ve visited the space several times. During work on this book, Mojang began the move to a new office space in Zinkensdamm, Södermalm, Stockholm.

Johan Brenner, a partner at the venture capital company Creandum, has been of great help with statistics on investments in Nordic IT companies. Per Strömbäck, spokesperson for the organization Dataspelsbranschen, has contributed thoughts about the Swedish gaming industry. The statement that developers are the most common profession among Stockholmers comes from the report “Yrkesstrukturen i Sverige 2009,” from Statistics Sweden.

Concerning Swedish development of broadband, see the report “Broadband Quality Study,” from Cisco, published in 2010, and the report from Post-och telestyrelsen, “Bredbandskartläggning,” from 2011.

Chapter 11. A Dilemma Concerning House Cats

The film clip showing the Starship Enterprise built in Minecraft, is at the time of writing, still on YouTube. In addition, there are a number of sequels, where you can see how the spaceship takes form.

Information about the number of viewers of YouTube channels comes directly from www.YouTube.com and will probably have changed since the text was written. The same goes for how many times a certain film has been viewed, the number of tweets on Twitter, and so forth. Several contributions to the official blog YouTube Trends (YouTube-trends.blogspot.com) describe Google’s own analysis of the phenomenon. Comparison of the popularity of search words on Google.com can easily be found via Google Trends (www.google.se/trends).

Alex Leavitt, SethBling, and David Pakman have all given interviews.

Chapter 12. Too Many for Two Pizzas

Interviews with Carl Manneh and Markus Persson have been the basis for re-creating the scenes from Game Developers Conference and E3. Lydia Winters was interviewed about her background, her view of Internet marketing, and the Minecraft phenomenon in general. Numbers concerning Mojang’s turnover and profit margin have been retrieved from the company’s yearly report.

Chapter 13. More Than a Game

Details of the founding of MinecraftEdu are based on interviews with Joel Levin, Santeri Koivisto, and their coworkers. Mojang has confirmed sales information regarding this special version of Minecraft. Mats Hultgren, at Svensk Byggtjänst, has elaborated on the ideas supporting the project in Fisksätra.

Chapter 14. Becoming a LEGO

Jakob Porser’s and Carl Manneh’s memories are the basis for re-creating the legal case between Mojang and ZeniMax. The episode was also covered extensively by the media, among others by the gaming website Kotaku. (kotaku.com). Rolf Jansson was interviewed concerning his view of the success of Minecraft and his relationship to Markus Persson today. Interviews with Jakob Porser, Carl Manneh, and Markus Persson have contributed to our discussion of Mojang’s present and future challenges.

Chapter 15. “You Did It, Markus. You Really Did It.”

The interview with James Green and Ken Klopp was done on-site in Las Vegas. Sudden Wealth Syndrome and the psychologists, Stephen Goldbart and Joan DiFuria, are described in a number of articles, most from the years around the turn of the millennium. For example, we recommend articles in The Economist and on www.sfgate.com. For more information about how lottery winners actually become happier, see for example the study Money and Mental Wellbeing: A Longitudinal Study of Medium-Sized Lottery Wins, from the University in Warwick, 2006 (www2.warwick.ac.uk).

Chapter 16. Back to the Boys’ Room

Markus Persson’s own thoughts about the future are the foundation for our discussion and for the scenes that are recounted in the chapter. Elin Zetterstrand has also been helpful by giving her view of life after Minecraft’s breakthrough.

Ludography

Below is a list of all the computer games that are mentioned in the book, giving title, platform, developer/publisher, and release year in chronological order.

Spacewar! (PDP-1), Steve Russell, 1962.

Pong (Arkad and others), Atari, 1972.

Pac-man (Arkad and others), Namco, 1980.

Donkey Kong (Arkad and others), Nintendo, 1981.

Bomberman (MSX, NES, and others), Hudson, 1983.

Tetris (C64/PC and others), Alexey Pajitnov, 1984.

Boulder Dash (C64 and others), First Star Software, 1984.

Duck Hunt (NES), Nintendo, 1984.

Tales of the Unknown: Volume 1: The Bard’s Tale (C64/PC and others), Interplay/Electronic Arts, Ariolasoft, 1985.

Gauntlet (Arkad and others), Atari, 1985.

Super Mario Bros. (NEX), Nintendo, 1985.

Saboteur (C64 and others), Clive Townsend, Steve Ruddy/Durrell, 1985.

The Legend of Zelda (NES), Nintendo, 1986.

Final Fantasy (NES), Square, 1987.

Herzog Zwei (Megadrive), Technosoft, 1989.

Minesweeper (PC), Microsoft, 1990.

Nibbles (PC), Rick Raddatz/Microsoft, 1991.

Day of the Tentacle (PC/Mac), LucasArts, 1993.

Doom (PC and others), id Software, 1993.

Puzzle Bobble (Arkad/Neo Geo), Taito, 1994.

Full Throttle (PC/Mac), LucasArts, 1995.

Dungeon Keeper (PC/Mac), Bullfrog/Electronic Arts, 1997.

Half-Life (PC/PS2), Valve/Sierra, 1998.

Grim Fandango (PC), LucasArts, 1998.

Counter-Strike (PC/Xbox), Valve, 1999.

Quake 3 Arena (PC and others) id Software/Activision 1999

Mall Maniacs (PC), UDS/Addgames, 1999

RollerCoaster Tycoon (PC/Xbox), Chris Sawyer Productions/Hasbro, 1999.

Unreal Tournament (PC/PS2/Dreamcast), Epic Games, Digital Extremes/GT Interactive, 1999.

Europa Universalis (PC), Paradox, 2001.

Halo: Combat Evolved (Xbox and others), Bungie/Microsoft, 2001.

Max Payne (PC/PS2/Xbox), Remedy/Gathering of Developers and others, 2001.

Battlefield 1942 (PC/Mac), DICE/Electronic Arts and others, 2002.

Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell (PC/Mac/Xbox/Gamecube/PS2 and others), Ubisoft/Ubisoft and others, 2002.

Call of Duty (PC/Mac and others), Infinity Ward/Activision, 2003.

Far Cry (PC), Crytek/Ubisoft, 2004.

Half-Life 2 (PC/Mac/Xbox/Xbox 360/PS3), Valve, 2004.

World of Warcraft (PC/Mac), Blizzard, 2004.

Hearts of Iron (PC), Paradox, 2004.

Motherload (PC/mac), XGen Studios, 2004.

Chronicles of Riddick: Excape from Butchers Bay (PC/Xbox), Starbreeze/Vivendi, 2004.

Psychonauts (PC/Xbox/PS2), Double Fine/Majesco, THQ, 2005.

Peter Jackson’s King Kong (PS2/Gamecube/Xbox/Xbox 360/PC and others), Ubisoft, 2005.

Narbacular Drop (PC), Nuclear Monkey Software/DigiPen, 2005.

Knytt (PC), Nicklas Nygren, 2006.

Just Cause (PC/PS2/Xbox/Xbox 360), Avalanche/Eidos, 2006.

Gears of War (Xbox/PC), Epic Games/Microsoft, 2006.

Slaves of Armok: God of Blood Chapter II: Dwarf Fortress (PC/Mac/Linux), Tarn Adams/Bay 12 Games, 2006.

Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter (PC and others), Grin/Ubisoft, 2006.

Wurm Online (PC/Mac/Linux), Code Club, 2006.

Team Fortress 2 (PC and others), Valve, 2007.

Knytt Stories (PC), Nicklas Nygren, 2007.

The Darkness (PS3/Xbox 360), Starbreeze/2Kgames, 2007.

Clean Asia! (PC), Jonatan Söderström, 2007.

Burn the Trash (PC), Jonatan Söderström, 2007.

Portal (PC/Mac/PS3/Xbox 360), Valve, 2007

Blueberry Garden (PC), Erik Svedäng, 2008.

Spore Origins (Ios and others), Tricky Software/Electronic Arts, 2008.

Shotgun Ninja (PC), Jonatan Söderström, 2008.

You Have to Knock the Penis (PC), Petri Purho & Erik Svedäng, 2008.

Stench Mechanics (PC and others), Cactus, 2008.

Harvest: Massive Encounter (PC/Mac), Oxeye, 2008.

Blast Passage (Web) Markus Persson, 2008.

Fat Princess (PS3/PSP), Titan Studios/Sony, 2009.

Battlefield Heroes (Web), DICE, Easy Studios/Electronic Arts, 2009.

Assassin’s Creed II (PC/Mac/Xbox 360/PS3), Ubisoft, 2009

Angry Birds (iPhone, Android, and others), Rovio/Chillingo, 2009.

Bionic Commando (PC/PS3/Xbox 360), Grin/Capcom, 2009.

Infiniminer (PC), Zachary Barth, 2009.

Wanted: Weapons of Fate (PC/PS3/Xbox 360), Grin, 2009.

Planeto (Web), Planeto, 2009.

Farmville (Web), Zynga, 2009.

Shot Shot Shoot (iPad), Erik Svedäng, 2010.

Gran Turismo 5 (PS3), Polyphony Digital/Sony, 2010.

Alan Wake (Xbox 360/PC), Remedy/Microsoft and others, 2010.

StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty (PC/Mac), Blizzard Entertainment, 2010.

Just Cause 2 (PC/PS3/Xbox 360/ and others), Avalanche/Eidos, 2010.

Battlefield 3 (PC/Xbox 360/PS3), DICE/Electronic Arts, 2011.

At a Distance (PC/Mac), Distractionware, 2011.

Keyboard Drumset Fucking Werewolf (PC/Mac), Jonatan Söderström, 2011.

The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim (PC/PS3/Xbox 360), Bethesda, 2011.

Cobalt (PC), Oxeye/Mojang, 2011.

AirMech (PC), Carbon Games, 2012.

Closure (PC/Mac/PS3), Eyebrow Interactive, 2012.

Thanks

Many thanks to everyone who graciously gave us the time to be interviewed, helping us piece this story together. Without you, this book would never have happened. Thanks also to Stefan Skog at Norstedts, for endless patience and enthusiasm; John Hagström, for brutal but well-meaning honesty; Dan Simon and Jesse Lichtenstein at Seven Stories; Jennifer Hawkins for her translation; Thomas Arnroth, for insightful comments; Mikael Hall, for office space; and to Deniz Kaya and Anna Silberstein, because you haven’t left us yet.

Translator's Thanks

The translator would like to thank eleven-year-old Nicklas Lumiere for initiating her personally into the world of Minecraft. It was an enlightening journey. Kim MacKay was indispensible as reader and giver of great advice.

About the Authors

Daniel Goldberg and Linus Larsson are two of Sweden’s best-known writers on new technology and the internet. Their first book Svenska Hackare, a nonfiction account of the Scandinavian hacker scene and phenomena such as The Pirate Bay, was published in spring 2011 to critical acclaim.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1: Three, Two, One . . .

Chapter 2: For Beginners

Chapter 3: “Do You Want Me to Feel Sorry for You or Something?”

Chapter 4: Games Worth Billions

Chapter 5: “They Just Don’t Get It.”

Chapter 6: Macho Men with Big Guns

Chapter 7: “This Is Way Too Much Fun. I Built a Bridge.”

Chapter 8: The Hedonic Hot Spot of the Brain

Chapter 9: “Yes, You Should Play This Game.”

Chapter 10: The Squid Situation

Chapter 11: A Dilemma Concerning House Cats

Chapter 12: Too Many for Two Pizzas

Chapter 13: More than a Game

Chapter 14: Becoming a LEGO

Chapter 15: “You Did It, Markus. You Really Did It.”

Chapter 16: Back to the Boys’ Room

Photographs

Sources

Ludography

Thanks

Translator's Thanks

About the Authors