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. While all Markus did was continue programming and documenting his progress online. The more they wrote, the more eyes turned toward Markus’s game. Within a couple of months, game blogs and discussion forums started teeming with accounts from enraptured gamers showing off their creations. And then word reached beyond the usual indie circles. The first to discover it were the already somewhat obsessed - devoted gamers and programmers looking for inspiration and the next big thing. As the days passed, word spread of the odd little game. Not exactly user-friendly and hardly optimal from a marketing standpoint.īut it worked anyway. Those who wanted to try it had to somehow find their way to, a simple website Markus built, then laboriously enter their credit card numbers, download the game, and install it on their own machine. Minecraft wasn’t available on Steam, Xbox Live Arcade, or in any of the other established online outlets. For one thing, it wasn’t exactly easy to get hold of. 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. The default Minecraft avatar, Steve.It had been a little over a year since the spring day when Markus first introduced Minecraft to the gaming world. And he concluded that about $5,800 had found its way into his bank account since yesterday morning. Four hundred people had bought Minecraft in the past twenty-four hours. On this particular morning, four hundred e-mails were waiting in Markus’s inbox. And so many people willing to pay for Minecraft was a pretty good indication that things were going pretty well. To Markus, those e-mails symbolized the acknowledgement of all his hard work and bore the fruits of his labors. Not only had clicking through them become second nature, it put him in a great mood. 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. Every time someone bought a copy of Minecraft, he received an e-mail. it was morning as Markus logged onto his computer at home, as part of the morning routine he had developed and rather enjoyed. The chapter also touches on Persson’s sister Anna and father Birger’s attempts to overcome drug addiction, which are fleshed out more in other parts of the book. It finds Persson, the game’s original creator, coming to terms with Minecraft’s burgeoning success, as his former coworker Jakob Porsér considers taking a management job at Midasplayer, a.k.a. This chapter from “ Minecraft: The Unlikely Tale of Markus ‘Notch’ Persson and the Game that Changed Everything,” excerpted with permission of the authors, tells the tale. If not for one single meeting that month, the indie game phenomenon could’ve gone down a very different path. A “full” version wouldn’t come out for 14 more months. In September 2010, Minecraft was just over a year past its initial, unfinished release.
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