The Markus Persson Story (full version). The story of Markus Persson (full version) How IT corporations can avoid taxation

15.03.2021

[Melody: "Last Trial" (part 4). Track "Nightmares"] Late evening. The small room is plunged into thick twilight. There is a rattle of the key in the lock. Entrance door opens, and a tired man of dense build enters it - Persson Sr. Without turning on the light, he takes off his hat, presses the answering machine button and, unbuttoning his coat, listens to the message left:- "We sympathize, but your brother passed away. Please accept our sincere condolences ..." There are beeps. A man approaches the sofa, doomedly sits on its edge and raises his eyes to the ceiling. At this time, a dark figure in a cloak appears in the corner, from under the hood of which whitish empty eye sockets burn with an unnaturally bright light:- You didn't expect me, dear Persson? Why don't you look me in the eyes, stupid? - I don't know you, go away... (surprisedly calmly, somewhat sadly) (The man throws back the hood from his face. Notch sees the ghost of his younger brother in front of him)- Both fire and water we went through together - Only you were blown away on copper pipes... - Get away from me!!! (jumps up, panting, his face shows that he is frightened)- Do you want to add anything, Notchik? For your soul, after all, I'm here, by the way ... There is nothing to hiss with an angry cobra! You still know who Herobrine is! Weakling! (The man in the raincoat disappears. The room changes its shape, turning into one of the game locations - the End. Mobs appear)- Where are you all from? (looks around) This is the Abyss! You are not here! - Do you recognize your comrades from the world of tags? You made us and you yourself ran from us! You are now rich, you are now famous! But you can't get away from the pay! Show me, Persson, show me the trick! You are alone - and your brother will not come to the rescue! You are now great, but your host has flown, And now you will remember our fists! Weakling! Persson, you are a wimp!!! Juggle the balls, friend Persson! The square world is the torment of your heart. All your admins are powerless against us! We are your fears, we are your doom, We are your torment, we are your doom! We are your torment, we are your death!!! - You are not here! (starts to back away, tries to run away)- You alone, Persson, on the edge of the grave! (- It all seems!) - We suck your pitiful strength! (- Don't touch me! Let me go!) - We are the nightmare and torment of your heart! And we'll sing a deadly song for you! (- I'll call my brother!) - Die, Persson! (- Leave me all!) - Die, Persson! (- Leave me! Brian!) - Die, die, die, (Brian! Brian, help! Get out everyone! Brian!!!) - Persson! (- Brian, where are you?!) - You are alone, and your brother will not come to the rescue! You are great now, but your host has fallen off... (- Don't touch me, don't touch me! Go away!) - And now you will remember our fists! (- Go away! Brian!) - And now you will remember our fists! (standing in a circle, shoving the victim to each other) Weakling! Weakling! Weakling! Weakling! Weakling! Weakling! Weakling! Weakling! (- Mom-ah-ah!!!) The ghostly purple light goes out. The man wakes up on the couch in the old room and jumps up in a cold sweat.

Name at birth:

Markus Alexey Persson

Occupation:

Game developer, owner and founder of Mojang

Date of Birth: Citizenship: Spouse:

Elin Zetterstrand (2011-2012)

Website:

Biography

Persson was born on June 1, 1979, in the city of Stockholm,. At first he lived in Denmark, and then moved with his parents to Sweden. Started programming at the age of 7 on a Commodore 128 home computer. Four and a half years (until 2009) he worked at King.com as a game developer.
Also participated in the development of jAlbum and Wurm Online. In May 2009, he founded Mojang Specifications.
On August 13, 2011, he married Elin Zetterstrand, but on August 15, 2012, Persson announced on Twitter that he was now single.

Personal life

Markus Persson lives in the city of Stockholm. He is a member of the Mensa organization, composes electronic music under the pseudonym "Markus Alexei". Criticizes large companies for their attitude towards piracy, is a member of the Pirate Party of Sweden.

Games

Minecraft

Markus' most popular sandbox game, which moved to Beta on December 20, 2010. Even when it was still in Alpha, the game became very popular in the Internet environment. Jeb (since Marcus has retired) develops Minecraft, improving and changing the game while it's not yet finished. In early 2011, Mojang AB sold 1 million copies of the game, and six months later, another 2 million people bought the game.

Breaking the Tower

The game was created within 48 hours. The game takes place on a small island where the player has to collect resources, build buildings and also train soldiers to destroy the big tower on the island.

Metagun

Another game made in 48 hours as part of the Ludum Dare contest. A 2D platformer with an original idea, in which the main character's weapon shoots little men who shoot real bullets. Another feature of the game is the protagonist's hat, which gives him invulnerability from bullets while he is wearing it, and which flies off when one bullet hits. Having caught the hat, the hero becomes invulnerable again. Additional hats can also be picked up in some game zones, the number of which will be counted at the end of the game.

Scrolls

Markus and Jakob Porser came up with the idea for the game Scrolls. The game seeks to combine elements from traditional card games and traditional board games into a strategy genre. Marcus said he would not accept Active participation in the development of the game, but Jakob will develop it.

0x10c

Marcus' new project. The plot unfolds when spaceships with people were launched, but the system crashed and the number 0x0000 0000 0000 0001 changed to 0x0001 0000 0000 0000, and people began to wake up only in 281 474 976 712 644. Distinctive feature games - a necessity to program in assembler for the fictional DCPU-16 processor.

Links

Wikimedia Foundation. 2010 .

Palmera, Marcos
Prok, Marcus

See what "Persson, Markus" is in other dictionaries:

Persson- (Swedish Persson) surname of Swedish origin, means "son of Per (Swedish form of the Christian name "Peter")". Analogue in Denmark and Norway Pedersen. Known bearers: Persson, Axel (1888-1951) Swedish archaeologist and historian of antiquity. Persson ... Wikipedia

0x10c- This article describes a computer game in development. After the release of the game, the information provided here may not be correct, and the content of the article may change significantly ... Wikipedia

Unlimited Detail- This article or section of the article contains information about planned or expected future software that is currently in development. The content of the article may vary by ... Wikipedia

World Junior Orienteering Championships- Jorgen Rostrup (1997/1998 ch) ... Wikipedia

Side by Side (Film Festival)- International LGBT Film Festival "Side by Side" International Gay and Lesbian Film Festival "Side by Side" ... Wikipedia

Sweden national football team- Nicknames Blågult (Swede ... Wikipedia

European Curling Championship- European Curling Championships competitions for national teams held under the auspices of the European Curling Federation (ECF). The first European Championship was held in 1975 in France. 8 men's and 7 took part in the first European Championship ... Wikipedia

Ice Hockey World Championship 2011- 2011 IIHF World Championship Majstrovstvá sveta v ľadovom hokeji 2011 Championship details Host country ... Wikipedia

Ice Hockey World Championship 2012- 2012 IIHF World Championship Jääkiekon maailmanmestaruuskilpailut 2012 Världsmästerskapet i ishockey för herrar 2012 ... Wikipedia

Ice Hockey at the 2010 Winter Olympics - Qualification (Men's)- Hockey in the winter Olympic Games 2010 Tournament Men ... Wikipedia

Books

Minecraft. The Incredible Story of Markus "Notch" Persson and the Game That Changed the World, Linus Larsson, Daniel Goldberg. Minecraft is a mega-popular game that has won the hearts of millions of fans around the world. At the same time, it is not like any of the games that came out before it. What is the secret of her success? Like Swedish...

In Stockholm, seven o'clock in the evening, Monday. Markus Persson sits on the balcony of his nine-story office and sips on a high-speed cocktail, where vodka is mixed with RedBull. Three hours ago, he said that he was not going to drink today, because he had not yet recovered from the alcohol race of 12 cocktails on Thursday and an inflammation of the middle ear. But now he is already holding a glass with an impressive portion of Belvedere and carefully watching how workers work at their keyboards in the windows of neighboring office buildings. "There's something wrong with this one," says Persson, pointing to a man in the building across the street, who is rubbing his face with his palms and staring at a computer monitor.

After a few more seconds of observing this man, Persson apparently becomes uneasy and abruptly leaves the balcony. The last five years, the 35-year-old Swede has spent just that: in front of a computer monitor, constantly worrying about his creation - Minecraft, the most popular computer game of all time. Although the word "game" does not sound very appropriate here. Minecraft already downloaded over 100 million users, has become a real new space for creative expression. Players enter an empty virtual space where they can use Lego-like bricks and building blocks to build anything they want, as long as others can interact with it. Most of the players are children who build ordinary houses or villages, and then throw parties there or repel zombie raids. But then there are obsessed adults who spend hundreds of hours building full-scale replicas of the Death Star, the Empire State Building, or cities from the Game of Thrones series. The word “minecraft” has bypassed the Bible, Harry Potter and Justin Bieber in the number of searches on Google. This game has earned over $700 million- mostly net profit.

So what is Minecraft?

Playing in "survival mode" is quite simple: your character (also known as "Steve") finds himself in the middle of a conditionally generated landscape. He needs to extract resources in order to make things necessary for survival from them. Approach a tree and "knock" it to get blocks of wood from which you can carve a shovel. Then use it to dig a hole or dig a shaft in a mountain. Make tools from stones, and then from iron. If you do not have time to build a shelter before nightfall, then various monsters will threaten you. In "creative mode" you can build anything: Big Ben, a disco club, a mansion. The only difference of this modern version Lego is that you can interact with other players and different creatures.

“Minecraft should not be compared to other popular games, but to cult products that have gone beyond one industry,- He speaks Ian Bogost, professor at Georgia Institute of Technology specializing in the video game industry. - It's like Lego for a new generation, or even like the microprocessor of our time."

In this virtual world, Persson, or rather his sharp-tongued, eccentric internet character Notch, has become practically a god for millions of gamers, setting the rules of the game with the authority of Zeus himself. But in real life Persson is strikingly different from his character. In personal communication, he is polite, speaks in simple words and avoids questions about himself. Very rarely agrees to an interview. The need to meet the expectations of gamers, who demanded from Notch constant attention to the development of the game, over time led to the fact that Persson began to carefully choose his words in conversation with other people.

Three months ago, Persson decided to retire and sold Minecraft to Microsoft Corporation. for $2.5 billion in cash. Getting money for a 71 percent share at game-owner Mojang, he joined the ranks of billionaires Forbes .

It turned out that a person who had not yet lived half of his life managed to create a whole universe, become a real deity in it, and then anger its inhabitants and leave Olympus. Now he has to figure out who he really is. So far, it’s not working out very well: it is thrown from side to side. Deciding to get a house in Beverly Hills, Persson laid out without looking $70 million for a huge mansion with an area of 7000 square meters- the most expensive house in the most expensive area. Then it became known that Persson frequented the nightclubs in Las Vegas, where he left up to $180,000 per night. Together with the second founder of Mojang Jacob Porser he founded the Rubberbrain company, just in case they had an idea new game. But so far the idea hasn't come to fruition.

His conversation with Forbes is Persson's first interview on the sale of Minecraft and the period of his life that followed. Apparently, the only conclusion he came to was that it was time to find himself. Persson is confident that leaving Minecraft was the right thing to do. Commenting on his fateful decision, he quotes Leonardo da Vinci: "You can't finish a work of art, you can just stop doing it."

The beginning of the Minecraft saga was laid in the small Swedish town of Edsbin, located in the forests, somewhere between Stockholm and the Arctic Circle. Most of the children there are engaged in the fact that they drive football in the summer and hockey with a sword in the winter. But Persson, quiet and not very sociable, played Lego for hours on end. When Marcus was seven, his father, who worked for the railroad company, brought home a Commodore 128 computer. By the age of eight, his son had already written his first computer program. Persson studied well, but it was not easy for him at school, especially when the family moved to Stockholm after the second grade. He found it difficult to make friends and spent even more time on the computer, where games such as the eight-bit puzzle game Boulder Dash and the action RPG The Bard's Tale were installed. In Minecraft: The Incredible Story of Markus "Notch" Persson, his mother, Ritva, recalls how her son pretended to have a stomachache to avoid going to school and spend the whole day at the computer.

Computer games became Persson's way of escaping the reality that his parents divorced when he was 12 years old. The father drank, and then became addicted to amphetamines. Marcus' younger sister began experimenting with drugs and eventually left home.

When Persson failed to finish school, his mother, who worked as a night shift nurse, forced him to enroll in online programming courses. It turned out to be a great investment of time and money. His childhood passion grew into a professional interest in game development, and in 2004, at the age of 24, he joined Midasplayer, later known as King.com, the developer of Candy Crush.

At work, Persson met Jacob Porser, a similarly shy young programmer. "It was a great place to start a career, Porser says. - We could develop games based on Flash and do everything ourselves, except for the graphics.” The two developers began inventing games, some of which became popular on independent gamer sites. But management didn't like it. “In our opinion, it is wrong when employees simultaneously work with us are engaged in the development of their own game production company,”- He speaks Midasplayer co-founder Lars Markgren who hired Persson.

How IT corporations can avoid taxation

By buying Minecraft, Microsoft was able to dispose of billions of dollars accumulated abroad (out of the reach of American taxpayers). Here is an overview of a few more companies suitable for such purposes. - R.M.

SPOTIFY
Grade: $4 billion
Investments received: $540 million
Potential Buyer: Google
Google has already made an attempt to buy the Stockholm-based music streaming service, but the price has been too high. Spotify now plans to raise $500 million, which will raise the company's valuation to $6 billion.

POWA
Grade: $2.7 billion
Investments: $176.7 million
Potential Buyer: Amazon
With its acquisition of rival Hong Kong-based MPayMe in June 2014, the UK-based mobile payment app soared in value to $2.7 billion. In November, Wellington Management funded another $80 million in Powa to help expand into the US market.

ADYEN
Grade: $1.5 billion
Investments received: $266 million
Potential Buyer: PayPal
The Amsterdam-based payment system moves $30 billion a year. Clients include Groupon, Spotify, Bookings.com and Facebook.

SHAZAM
Grade: $1 billion
Investment: more $125 million

Shazam's 100 million users generated over $45 million in revenue in 2013. But this inventive application is not profitable yet. In January, the company received a $30 million investment from an undisclosed source.

TRANSFERWISE
Grade: $1 billion
Investments received: $90.4 million
Potential Buyer: Facebook
This summer, Richard Branson invested in a British startup that offers cheap international transfers.

SOUNDCLOUD
Grade: $700 million
Investments received: order $125 million
Potential Buyer: Apple
Last spring, a German site that allows users to share music files was eyed by Twitter. Soundcloud is currently in talks to secure a $150 million investment that will raise the company's value to $1.2 billion.

In 2009, Persson left Midasplayer to take a job as a programmer at Jalbum, an online photo-sharing service. There, no attention was paid to his second job. He devoted all his free time to his non-standard-looking creation, where players mined resources such as wood and stone to construct different things from them - from axes and shovels to houses and cities. Persson called this minecraft game and posted an unfinished version of it online in May 2009, on the independent gamer site TIG Source. The first users of the game were experienced and tech-savvy players who had to test all its bugs, even create a whole community to figure out how to play it. Minecraft was not the first sandbox game, nor was it the first interactive program that offered players to collect resources to survive in hostile world. (In the original version, players could be attacked by exploding monsters at night). But the timing of this game's release on the market turned out to be decisive: parents just began to give laptops, smartphones and tablets to children who had not yet grown up to Facebook and Instagram, but could already create content on the Internet.

By June 2010, sales of the game had grown up to 400 per day, $6 per download. Persson and Porser left their main jobs, and the first even took his boss with him, CEO Jalbum Carl Mannech to run the business. The new company was named Mojang, which means "gadget" in Swedish.

Minecraft's secret weapon is Notch. It was not just a name, for Persson it was a way to communicate with the world. Through blogs, forums and Twitter, he answered every question from the fans, whether it was about the game, development, or real life issues. Each of his appearances on the Minecraft server was perceived by users as a phenomenon Elvis Presley in front of the fans. Notch has become an inspirer for change for the players. His brimmed-hat profile has become synonymous with independent developers fighting big corporations. Persson's alter ego had an audience from more than 2 million Twitter users who raptly hung on his every word about the “cynical bastards” at Electronic Arts releasing indie games under their brand, or the inventor of the Oculus VR virtual reality helmet who sold the rights to the invention to the “abominable” Facebook.

Persson did not spend a single crown on marketing - Minecraft's popularity grew due to viral distribution. The pace picked up after Mojang added Android and iOS versions, which are still among the top three paid apps in the US to this day. In May 2012, Mojang released a version for Microsoft's Xbox 360 that sold over 1 million copies for the first week (today -
15 million). Then came the licensing agreements. Minecraft-inspired clothing from San Diego-based firm J!NX has become a best-seller among young audiences, as have books about creation and the rules of the game. Egmont Publishing International, which produced several of these guides, ended up selling 7.5 million copies in over 60 countries. Last year, Warner Bros. bought the movie rights from Mojang.

The company employs only around 30 employees, so Mojang's profits seem sky-high. In 2012 she received $230 million from sales and profit before tax was more than $150 million. $101 million of this amount, Persson paid himself in exchange for intellectual property rights. (He immediately bought the most expensive apartment in Stockholm).

Investors tirelessly cut circles around the company. Manneh relates that during that period he met with more than 100 venture capital funds, including the elite landing force from Silicon Valley represented by Sequoia Capital and Accel Partners. But it did not come to investments, simply because Mojang did not need them. Then he came billionaire Sean Parker, who flew Persson, Porser and Mannech to London on his private plane, where he gave them a wild party. But they still didn't take any money from him.

"We flew for the first time in a private jet" Mannech recalls. But not the last. The company, which did not use the funds of investors, brought its owners such a profit that they commissioned oil portraits of employees in the style of the Italian Renaissance. To celebrate the 10 millionth download of the game, the entire staff of the company was taken to Monaco, where they drank champagne and sailed for three days. And although the shares of the company belong to the three founders, in 2012 Persson thanked the employees with bonuses totaling $3 million.

The world was at his feet, but Persson increasingly felt as if he carried the weight of the world on his shoulders. After the official launch of Minecraft at the end of 2011, at the first Minecraft in Las Vegas, he announced that he was stepping down as the main developer in order to search for new ideas for games and devote more time to his fiancee, who became his wife that summer.

But this respite was temporary. Persson's father, who struggled unsuccessfully with drug addiction and depression, committed suicide before Christmas. The death of his father was a blow to Marcus. He felt that he did not know what he wanted from life. He divorced his wife a year after the wedding. “From today I am “single” #don’t know what to think”, - he wrote on Twitter. And when, after a short break, Persson returned to the office, it turned out that they were waiting for ideas from him, comparable in scale to the first hit.

At the same time, Persson continued to be the face of Minecraft. No matter that he moved away from development, Notch was still the one to whom the players addressed all their requests for code refinement or bug fixes. Even small rule changes, such as those related to posting on a virtual forum, caused a flurry of complaints and barbs against Notch, who had nothing to do with them. In replies to Persson's tweets or in the comments under any YouTube video featuring Notch, one can find comments like "Notch always looks like a jerk" or "Notch is a fat freak."

"I can't understand why people on the internet are so mean, Persson says. - When you see such comments, it seems that they are even written in a larger font. The person who created the flamboyant Internet character began to feel like the target of hostile opinions addressed to this character. Therefore, Persson began to think about how to get out of the game.

It all started with a very ordinary tweet. On June 16, 2014, Persson woke up with a runny nose and did not go to work. On that day, Minecraft users went on the warpath because the company began to enforce terms of the user agreement that prohibited players from charging others for certain features in the game, such as increasing the durability of weapons. The rate of negative comments on Twitter had already reached several hundred per hour, when an exasperated Persson, who was feverish with a temperature, in his heart wrote a 129-letter post that changed his life forever.

“No one wants to buy my stake in Mojang so I can live in peace?- he asked. - Otherwise, I’m tired of listening to insults for trying to do everything by the rules. ”

Mojang CEO Carl Manneh was at home with his family that day. He had just finished reading this tweet when the phone rang. One of the key employees of Microsoft, with whom Mojang negotiated and signed contracts, wanted to know if Persson was really ready to sell his stake in the company. "I don't know, let me call you back" - Manneh said.

Persson wrote his tweet half in jest, but the idea of parting ways with Mojang has already taken root. The man who once swore publicly that he would never sell out to "evil corporations" now felt like his head was spinning. Over the next week, he was constantly called by Microsoft, Electronic Arts, Activision Blizzard and others. Negotiations with Activision gradually came to naught. Persson remains cryptically silent about EA, but mentions that Mojang immediately refused to consider potential buyers who have a "different approach to games." Microsoft apparently managed to get past this face control. An additional motivation for the mega-corporation was that the deal allowed them to avoid paying part of the taxes. Microsoft at the time didn't know what to do with its overseas profits of $93 billion, which the company did not want to import into the US, so as not to pay Uncle Sam his share.

So Mannech managed to impose his own terms of the deal: all three founders can leave the company without any obligation to it. In addition, mindful of staff cuts after Microsoft bought Nokia, Manneh demanded that none of the employees be fired. (Although under the state in 47 people That question probably wouldn't even be asked.)

From the side of Microsoft, negotiations led head of X Box Phil Spencer, who communicated exclusively with Mannech. Persson and Porser pulled out of the talks, though Spencer met with them at an old Stockholm restaurant, where they argued about the future of the gaming industry over a glass of tincture. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella never showed up in Scandinavia to oversee the biggest deal in the history of his leadership of the company. He only called Mannech twice to speed things up.

On September 15, Microsoft announced that it was buying Mojang. for $2.5 billion. Within a couple of hours of the announcement, Persson wrote his final blog on the site, explaining why he was leaving. "It's not about the money, he stressed. - I want to keep my sanity."

Looking back at that period, Persson says he expected the worst response from Minecraft fans. “The day we announced the deal, I was about to delete my Twitter account because I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to handle all the negativity,” he says. But they took it quite calmly. They read my explanations and wrote: “Well, we hope that you will solve your problems.” As for his claims that he will never sell out to a big corporation, Persson shrugs and says he will have to come to terms with this contradiction at the cost of at $2.5 billion. “Of course, you have to answer for your words,” he says. “But I wouldn’t say that I’m so ashamed that I changed my mind.”

The Mojang staff took the dramatic change of wind in the sails much more keenly. Although they all received bonuses from the deal (Porser - over $300 million clean; Manneh - over $100 million), many of them, according to an employee who wished to remain anonymous, felt “disappointed and empty.” Some still keep their distance and treat Persson with a chill.

“We spoiled them, their reaction made me very upset”, Persson says. However, he managed to get through it. In November, when the deal finally closed, Persson, Porser, Manneh, and Manneh's twin brother flew to Miami and St. Barts to celebrate the deal. Persson called their little vacation "a voyage of the sold out."

Now Persson pays far less attention to offensive posts on Twitter than to the exchange of barbs on Whats App, where his close friends have united in a group with the vulgar name "Farts". Freed from Minecraft, Persson regressed into adolescence. In the makeshift office of his new company, Rubberbrain, there are constant "below the belt" jokes and booming laughter, followed by the annoyed banging on the radiators of the upstairs neighbors. Persson ignores this knock as well as the opinions of Internet trolls. He says his favorite thing on Twitter right now is the "ignore" button, which allows you to block users' messages without notifying them.

Sometimes curiosity wins, he reads their posts and can't help but reply. Particularly vicious users are sent a frame from the movie "Zombieland" with Woody Harrelson wiping tears with a wad of money. "I know it's a little dumb, - Persson shrugs. - But what can you do.” He is just as frank with the people he likes. He sends them Snapchat photos from vacations and private jet cabins. And as for the girls... "I tried Tinder, - he says - I did not like. In Sweden it is useless, there are like four people sitting there.” Hence the accounts for $180,000 from nightclubs.

“I'm trying to catch up a bit. When I was 20, all I did was program - he says. - Entertainment isn't the healthiest way to spend money, but it's fun. When we were young, we had no money, so I always knew that if I got rich, I would not be one of those boring people who never spend on anything.

Now his expenses include furnishing his new office: he has fantasies about a bar, a DJ stand (he's learning how to turn turntables himself), and a secret room. And all this despite the fact that Rubberbrain is a company that has nothing but a name so far.

The fact that inspiration does not come is quite understandable. Persson spends time on Twitter and Reddit in his new office, while Porser reads the fan forums of the hockey team he played for as a child and plays simple online games where you get points by blowing up bugs or whatever.

"We are here like Kindergarten for adults - Persson says. “Sometimes a concept is born, we discuss it for a couple of days, and then we start playing games again.” Maybe this period will end. But there are many other Markus Perssons around - younger and more active. When asked about this, the creator of Minecraft replies that he is quite satisfied with the role of the author of one hit. Immense wealth and premature exhaustion of creative resources seem to be better than the stress of being responsible for a virtual nation that both idolizes and despises you.

“People began to perceive Notch as some kind of ideal,” he talks about his character. - Sometimes I remember the first time I met idols and thought: “Damn, this is just an ordinary person.” So here. My relationship with fans was not at all what I thought it would be."

As they leave Rubberbrain's office, Persson's assistant hands him a handwritten letter from an American gamer. A dollar bill is pinned to a sheet filled with round letters, as if drawn by the hand of a diligent fifth grader. The author of the letter asks Persson to add a new feature to Minecraft. "They sent us a bribe, Persson jokes, reading what he has written and frowning. Then he points to the dollar: - So, shall we send it back?"

The richest people in the gaming industry


Gave Newell valve $1.3 billion One of the most respected figures in the business. Newell owns more than 50% of Valve, a Washington-based software. Their development - the Steam gaming platform - is the industry's main online sales channel.	Markus Persson Mojang $1.3 billion The game designer created the hit building game Minecraft. In its controlling company Mojang, he owned a 71% stake. Mircosoft bought Mojang for $2.5 billion in cash.	Mark Pinkus Zynga $990 million The co-founder and former CEO of Zynga is now significantly less wealthy than it was during the heyday of FarmVille, when shares were worth over $14.50 apiece. The price is now down to less than $3, but early investments in Napster, Twitter and Facebook are keeping Pinkus comfortable.	Melvin Morris King Digital $627 million Morris made his first fortune through dating site Udate.com, and made his second fortune as chairman and co-founder of a London-based light game studio. They released the ever-popular Candy Crush game. Morris stepped down as chairman of King in November.	Riccardo Zacconi King Digital $548 million Another millionaire author of Candy Crush. Italian Riccardo has led the company since its early days, but like the other co-founders, his fortunes have dwindled since it went public in March 2014.	Palmer Lucky Oculus VR $500 million The inventor of the Oculus Rift virtual reality helmet was only 21 years old when he sold his company to Facebook for $2 billion. Lucky is the first person in history to become so rich at that age. He is now working on the first user version of the product, which is expected to hit the market towards the end of the year.	Ilkka Paanen Supercell $400 million CEO and founder of the most popular Finnish game studio on the market. Few companies manage to create such a hit as Clashof Clans, Supercell's flagship game. And almost no one managed to repeat the success, releasing a second hit in a row, such as Boom Beach.

This game has recently attracted a huge number of players. The number of people who play this game exceeds one hundred million people. It's about about which consists of many small blocks.

During the gameplay, the hero, who controls his avatar, builds, mines and shifts these blocks from place to place. In addition, the player fights mobs that attack his home at night.

This popular game, which has attracted a lot of attention, has its own legendary author, the man who is its creator. Who created Minecraft? This question is asked by many children who play this virtual constructor. From this article you will learn about who created Minecraft. The name of this person is also interesting to some adults.

The creator of the game "Minecraft"

The author's name is Markus Persson. Markus is a programmer from Sweden and also a game designer. Much better known by his pseudonym Notch (Notch). He created his first game at just 9 years old on a home computer. Growing up, he became the owner of Mojang AB. Besides him, the founders were also Carl Mannech and Jacob Porser. The company was established in 2009.

Notch's office

Now the company employs more than 35 people. Markus is one of Sweden's largest taxpayers. His company is valued at $2 billion. The attitude towards employees in Notch's company is very loyal. Every Friday, Markus allows people who work for him to play games and also work on their own projects.

Quite remarkable. It is designed in the style of a "hunting house" in his office. He has a pool table, a room for showing various films, a jukebox, and a pinball machine. In addition, there is even a wall with portraits of employees. These portraits are very unusual. They are painted in oils, people posing in the clothes of the aristocracy of the 19th century.If we look at the portrait of Notch, we see that there he is in evening suit and fedora sitting on a chair with an arrogant look.Next to him, as an essential piece of furniture, is a large globe.

Atmosphere in Persson's company

All this became possible thanks to his key project "Minecraft". The author of this game, which was the most unexpected breakthrough in this area in a decade, attracted a lot of attention. It's quite common for him to hang out with stadium-level DJs. According to rumors, the British Prince Harry was also present at one of these parties.

In 2012, Notch even arranged a pyrotechnics celebration in one of the Parisian establishments. The musical accompaniment of this action was provided by "Skrillex". Markus takes his employees with their families to Monaco. In the photo album, which lies on the negotiating table in his office, there are several pictures where a whole fleet of aircraft brings workers, also in these photographs they drive around in a Ferrari, arrange a holiday on a yacht, and ride helicopters. Commenting on these photos, Porser, co-owner of the company, says: "We wanted to make Mojang a place where we would always like to work."

The unexpected success of a strange game

Notch is the person who created Minecraft. While there is no scenario or levels in this game (there's not even an obvious goal), players can explore an almost endless world. They can collect resources and build almost anything. Create entire worlds with your sights. This is what the faithful followers of Markus Persson do.

Well, now you know who created Minecraft. We wish you to get acquainted with this great game and more often discover colorful endless worlds in everyday life.