The Amazingly Unlikely Story of How Minecraft Was Born (3)

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 (above) 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 LEGOs 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.

Minecraft Mojang

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 often, in accordance with the Swedish saying “hellre än bra” (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.

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