Markus Persson

Markus Alexej Persson, known online as Notch, was born on 1 June 1979 in Stockholm, Sweden, to a Finnish mother and a Swedish father. He has one sister. The family lived in Edsbyn until he was seven, then returned to Stockholm. His father worked for the railroad and his mother as a nurse; after his parents divorced when he was around seven, he and his sister lived with their mother, experiencing food insecurity about once a month. His father, who suffered from depression, bipolar disorder, alcoholism, and medication abuse, later went to jail for robberies. Persson became interested in video games early, learning to use the family’s Commodore 128 from his father. He began programming at age seven and made his first game, a text-based adventure, at eight. By 1994 he wanted to be a game developer but was advised to study graphic design, which he did from ages 15 to 18. He was a good student but did not finish high school.

Persson worked as a web designer, then at Game Federation, where he met Rolf Jansson. Together they built the 2006 game Wurm Online, released through an entity called Mojang Specifications AB. Persson left the project in late 2007. From 2004 to 2009 he worked for Midasplayer (later King), programming browser games in Flash, and later for jAlbum. In 2009, inspired by the block-based mining game Infiniminer, he returned to a first-person mode he had experimented with in an earlier project called RubyDung, an isometric base-building game. This became the foundation for Minecraft. He released the original edition on the TIGSource forums on 17 May 2009, updating it based on user feedback. After the Alpha version’s release in June 2010, he left jAlbum. In September 2010 he visited Valve’s headquarters and met Gabe Newell. By the time Minecraft officially launched in 2011, it had sold over four million copies. Persson then stepped down as lead designer, handing creative control to Jens Bergensten. He founded Mojang Studios in 2009. In September 2014 he announced he would leave Mojang; the company was sold to Microsoft in November 2014 for a reported US$2.5 billion, making him a billionaire. Since 2016, his Twitter posts on feminism, race, and transgender rights have sparked controversy. Microsoft removed mentions of his name from Minecraft (except in the end credits) and did not invite him to the game’s tenth anniversary. In 2015 he co-founded Rubbe