Markus "Notch" Persson's Story in 9 Minutes | How Minecraft Became Bigger Than Its Creator

He's a Swedish video game programmer and designer. He co-founded the video game company that created Minecraft in 2010. He has an estimated net worth of $1.5 billion. He's Markus "Notch" Persson, and here are his top 10 rules for success.

Can you tell us a little bit about how you got started in video game development? Oh, well, when I was really, really young, like 8 years old, My dad got us a Commodore 128, and we started subscribing to a magazine that had like code listings for games. And I started entering them and started toying with them. So it's been with me for a long time. It's kind of gradually been growing, and then it became a profession, and then I quit that job and started— and just went indie. And can you— what advice would you give to people who want to get started in video game development themselves? Well, yeah, look at what other people have done. Look at tutorials. Look at code and just play with the code. And then once you're comfortable with it, don't try to make your biggest game, just make a small game and actually finish it. I've been playing games forever and I've been programming since I was 8, so obviously I have some kind of experience in it and I kind of, I can understand kind of what's fun gameplay. But I didn't mean to make Minecraft a big success. To claim that I know the secret sauce would be kind of false. Was there a formula? No, I wasn't following a formula, I was trying to make a game. Well, I think actually working on it is more important than thinking about it. So if you just get started, even if it's not something big, even if it's just small, just try to make games or look at tutorials or play with code other people have made or something. And then also to keep a critical eye towards what you're doing, because it's very easy to just assume what you're doing is good because you're used to it. But if you try to see it with like the eyes of a new player, it helps a lot. I think the best advice I can give everyone is don't listen to advice. But if you are going to listen to advice, then making sure you actually do something is good advice. If you just sit around planning something and not doing it, you're not actually going to get anywhere.

You sold your company recently to Microsoft, but you haven't really been talking about it. So what happened there?

I wasn't working on Minecraft anymore, and I hadn't for a long time, but I still was kind of responsible for it since I made it. The main shareholder of Mojang. And then this big thing happened with the ULA incident, where people thought that we changed the rules and like—

The End User License Agreement.

Yeah. Which had always been in place, but what actually happened was that some people brought it up like, "So we're not allowed to do this and that?" And we said, "No." So we looked it over and actually made the rules more lenient. But people still got very upset with like me personally, even though I wasn't even working on it anymore. I just figured like, I don't know if I want to put up with this anymore. And then I saw the This Is Phil Fish video, which is a YouTube documentary about a guy called Phil Fish, and it talks about how like internet personalities and like famous people, people aren't really, they're not talking to that actual person when they talk to a person, they're talking about the idea of that person. How does it disconnect when you respond personally to stuff that's not really intended to be personal? And I kind of just figured like, I probably maybe I don't have to put up with this. So just when that happened and everyone's giving me so much like crap online, I just went, no, this is not worth it anymore. So I just tweeted kind of jokingly, like, who wants to buy the company? And a couple of days later, Carl, the CEO, came by and said, we got a bunch of offers. Like, were you serious? And I thought about it for a while and I said, yeah, maybe it's time. How do you run your Minecraft company? Have you sold out to the evil corporations yet? No, not yet. We hope not to. But how long do you think you'll be able to do that before you kind of get absorbed by the Borg? I think that depends on how long we can kind of keep the fun mood going that we have. It was very stressful. It really got to me. I didn't want to work on the project anymore because I wanted to just write prototypes or new games and stuff. That's the stuff I actually get happy from doing. And I felt like still like I needed to be responsible for it because I was still like the main owner of the company, and it was me who developed the game, and people were looking up to me. And for me, it was very important to make sure that it was a clean break. It wasn't trying to get some investor in, trying to grow the company, do a big exit. It was more about getting it quick and easy and just get it done with. I think the difference there is kind of people who do something as their job and as their hobby, you get so much more experience so much faster. So you can kind of skip a few of the steps, I think. I think it's very important. You're never going to be an expert right off the bat. You have to— because I've been programming since I was 8, and I'm far from an expert still. And it's like, you can't expect the first thing you do to be a hit. So having a few jobs and such is probably a good idea, because before King, I didn't know how to finish games. So that was a huge experience for me. Yeah, but since I did it as a hobby as well, I kind of— You've got to learn faster than just doing it as a job. Oh yeah, letting other people into the code. That was really scary. Jels is the guy now working on Minecraft with me.

One change I've made is that spiders will climb up walls.

They use a ladder thing? Yeah. Okay.

They are always on ladders.

Okay. So if they hit the— okay, yeah, that's a pretty clever hack.

Every time you change stuff, somebody is going to say that it's It's better before, and some can say it's, oh, this is much better. But most of the time you have to focus on what you're feeling yourself, if it's good or bad. Another thing, a suggestion is to make a scarecrow because it would be so fun because you have like a pumpkin here.

Yeah.

And there's some cloth and then some sticks. It would look very cute.

Or the hay in the middle.

Oh yeah, the hay, of course.

Maybe you can use them like a target dummy for the creepers.

Yeah, it would attract monsters.

And we should have snowmen as well that throw snowballs. It's like when I see suggestions from the community, then I try not to add it because it feels like I'm doing like— just they ask for things, then I add them, and it's not necessarily my idea that's driving it anymore. But that's changing now because Jens is adding stuff that he thinks works. But when I see it actually in the game and it makes sense, it was much easier to just accept it. It worked a lot better than I thought it would. I think it's a matter of just letting go, I think. Because it's good for the game. But the trap block was just brilliant.

Yeah, right now it's really fun to add stuff to Minecraft, I must say. It's also fun to be part of this so early. And really be with the core team. I don't know how big we're going to be in the future, but it's fun to be here from almost the beginning.

I have been working on prototypes and trying to learn new languages, but it's not really the intent that I'm going to finish a game. Maybe I will at some point, and then it's good to have a company set up for it. And it's fun to have the idea when you're working on stuff, like it's supposed to become something, but not feel like pressure, like it has to. So you could possibly never release a game again? Yeah, and I would be fine with that. It was a long time when I was freaking out, like, how do I follow up on Minecraft? It was really hard to deal with, like, because it's the entire, like, big, like, cultural phenomenon. You can't manufacture that. Maybe now that I've analyzed it, I understand some of why Minecraft worked, but that only means I know how Minecraft worked back in time when the context was made in. That doesn't mean I know how to do it again. I kind of feel like I made a game and then the community kind of made the community around the game and the combination of the two is kind of the true Minecraft. So it's way more than just the game I made about just chopping rock kind of slowly. Because for example, creative mode is not what I wanted in the game at all, but it's in the game because a lot of people use it. And then people are doing really cool mods and they're doing really intricate stuff like abusing bugs in redstone so we can't fix it. And it's turned into something much bigger and it's very impressive. And it's very fun to be able to be part of that. Yeah, I think when I was like really young I said I wanted to be a cop or something. But I kind of always knew that I wanted to make games. And I said so in school to my like career counselor thing. And she said, "Well, that's probably not gonna happen." Yeah.

Thank you guys so much for watching. I made this video because Zedsky asked me to. So if there's a famous entrepreneur that you want me to profile next, leave it in the comments below and I'll see what I can do. I'd also love to know which of the top 10 rules had the biggest impact on you. Leave it in the comments and I will join the discussion. Thank you so much for watching. Continue to believe, and I'll see you soon.