What is Minecraft?

Who made this thing?

Minecraft was created by Markus Persson, better known as Notch. On November 19th, 2011, Jens Bergensten (Jeb) took over creative control so Markus could concentrate on new things.

Thanks to Minecraft's success, Markus formed his own company in 2009, Mojang AB, which went on to develop Scrolls and publish Oxeye Studio's Cobalt.

A longer history

June 1st, 2009, Stockholm. Markus Persson quits his job at an established games developer to make his own game. Looking for inspiration on the indie development blog TIGSource, he found Zachtronics' Infiniminer, a game about collecting resources while cutting into a randomly generated landscape. He saw the potential for something great, and began a new project a few weeks after Infiniminer was discontinued.

"Cave Game" was not the Minecraft you play today, but it came from the same DNA: placing and breaking blocks in a 3D world, where each individual piece felt fun. A game that could be both accessible and emergent.

Next came multiplayer, so players could dig together, then Survival to make the world feel dangerous. A mention on the Team Fortress 2 blog and a PC Gamer interview on July 29, 2010 introduced Minecraft to a wider audience.

On September 18th 2010 the Minecraft web server crashed under the number of players signing up; Markus made the game free to compensate, causing another spike in downloads. A 1:1 replica of the Starship Enterprise went viral on YouTube. Minecraft was getting harder to ignore.

Then came a 16-bit computer built entirely in the game, which Markus celebrated on his now notorious Twitter feed. The RMS Titanic, a marriage proposal and a spookily accurate BioShock Rapture followed: the community was realising the game's potential.

A Halloween update brought pumpkins, fish, working clocks and a portal to The Nether, launched on October 30th despite 85,000 bots knocking the servers over ten days earlier. On December 20, 2010 Minecraft entered beta, and note blocks sparked a whole new genre of musical parodies.

Awards followed, from IndieDB's Indie Game of the Year to accolades at GDC. February 2011 added beds; June brought the Adventure Update with hunger, new combat and the Endermen. Minecraft reached Android in October and iOS in November.

Minecraft was officially released on November 18th, 2011 at the MineCon keynote, and the next day Jeb took over creative control, bringing tameable animals, maps, pistons, villagers and The End through weekly snapshots. The Xbox 360 edition sold four million copies in its first five months.

The rest is in the future, and there's a lot more to come.