The expanding universe, and fan base
The man named ‘Chris; created Minecraft in the summer of 2009, he had to do all the work himself.
One weekend in May, we mashed up various elements of the game, such as Dwarf Fortress and Infiniminer, to create a completely unique game base and published it on the TIGSource forum for independent game players and creators.
A month later, he decided to have the user pay 10 euros to download the game. Minecraft sold about 40 bottles on the very first weekend. Gradually, users will talk about the game. There was no instruction manual for this game. You can try and error how to make a bed (cut the tree three times and prepare about three lumps of wool), but it’s faster to ask other users.
Minecraft as an alpha version
Personne then tries to launch Minecraft as an alpha version. The game itself was almost complete, but he deliberately released it unfinished. And every Friday, Personne updated the game with new content.
Sales increased each time. “I think it’s because the users have been actively discussing the game,” says Personne. He always involved in TIGSource discussions, still participates in forums with early Minecraft users, and continues to interact with users on Twitter (“Notch” has 660,000 followers) and the Tumblr page. There is.
Each player created their own world, and the personne expanded Minecraft’s universe through dialogue with the player. Over time, Minecraft became talked about on 4chan and Reddit. When sales reached 15,000, Personne the Minecraft reached beyond the scale of indie releases.
King.com
In the summer of 2010, Personne founded Mojang in collaboration with Jacop Porcel, a former CEO of photo-sharing site jAlbum, and Karl Money, whom he met at flash game developer King.com. At that time, Minecraft had sold 200,000, and PayPal suspected fraud in Personne’s account.
Mojang has licensed Minecraft’s IP from Notch Development. This means that most of the money flows to the personne. Next, the beta version of the game appeared in November of the same year. On January 12, 2011, Minecraft sales topped 1 million, surpassing 2 million in April and 3 million in August.
Therefore, “Notch” held a user’s offline event <Minecon>. A few days before the November event, Minecraft reached 4 million sales.
On November 18, following the beta version, the regular version was released for 19.95 euros and sold 1.5 million copies. It was like a grand entry into a private party in the big video game industry, where indie game developers weren’t invited. Personne seems to enjoy it more than anyone else.
History of genius engineer
There is a dream that personnes repeatedly dream of. “When I was a kid, it was a little scary dream of wandering in the woods with my friends and not getting lost.”
Markus Alexei Pelson was born in June 1979. Chris grew up in a small town called Edsbyn, right in the center of Sweden.
“I was mainly playing outside,” says Personne. “I used to explore the forest.”
My mother was a nurse and my father worked as a Swedish railroad worker. “My dad was the nerd itself. He got the Commodore 128 and made a modem.” At the age of seven, his parents divorced, “That’s not a good memory. I haven’t talked to my dad for years.”)
And he moved to the suburbs of Stockholm with his mother. Eventually, Personne also begins to play with Commodore. “I had a lot of tapes packed with pirated games. The first game that I played called The Bard’s Tale. I didn’t understand it at all, there were too many English notations.” Personne does not read the instruction manual.
At the age of eight, I started programming with the help of my sister. She read aloud the code listed in the magazine. “That’s how I learned to program. I’m a cowboy programmer from the ground up.”
A text adventure game
That same year, he showed his father the first game. A text adventure game. I didn’t know how to save the game, so I had to retype the program every time I turned it off. Personnes were well-known students, if not popular at school. At the age of 16, he transferred to Gymnasium (a Swedish secondary school), but he has only one friend. He spent more time alone.
“I started spending time at home, just typing in programs and playing games again and was captivated by’DOOM’. I thought I’d try to imitate it.” Personne has completely reverse-engineered the game engine. He is the second most proud of this after making Minecraft.
After graduating from school, he started working as a web programmer, riding the IT boom in Stockholm. He retired a few years later thinking it wouldn’t be difficult to find another job, but at the same time, the net bubble burst. “I became unemployed and spent about two years working at a computer school. I lived with my mother at home.”
The sandbox game Wurm Online
Later, when he found a job as a programmer, he and his colleagues developed the sandbox game Wurm Online. Like Minecraft, players were remodeling the surface and digging underground.
Personne then joined Midas, who later changed its name to King.com known for producing large numbers of flash games. Personne says he developed a new game every two months, producing a total of 25 to 30 games.
It was around this time that I met Porcel. Alex Norstrum, now Deputy Director of Economic Research at Spotify, was once an employee of King.com. “What sets Marx apart from other employees at King.com is that he had a deep knowledge of the game,” he says.
“King.com was a spec-focused company. Marx had all the knowledge and could do anything by himself. It was a one-man show.” Personne was banned from spending his spare time making games and soon retired from King.com. Then, a month after leaving the company, I created Minecraft.
