By Jens Hansegard And Sven Grundberg
STOCKHOLM--Many fans of Minecraft creator Markus Persson have
long held him up as an outspoken programmer who relishes public
brawls with global tech giants and champions small, independent
game and software developers like his own, Mojang AB.
Now, Notch, as he's known in gaming circles, is in the middle of
negotiating the sale of Mojang for some $2 billion, according to a
person familiar with the matter. And the buyer is Microsoft Corp.,
once the target of one of his most bitter Twitter tirades. That is
triggered a bout of soul searching among some of Mr. Persson's
biggest supporters.
"A lot of them have seen Minecraft, and Mojang by extension, as
the forerunner to the indie game development scene," said Tommy
Carpenter, lead editor of Minecraft Forum, an online forum for
Minecraft players. "To them the idea of an independent company
getting acquired by a larger corporation is just foreign. They
don't understand what would cause that to happen."
Mr. Persson's sale to Microsoft--if it goes through--would be
the latest twist in an unorthodox career path even by the standards
of the rags-to-riches gaming industry. Mr. Persson, 35 years old,
developed his first computer game at the age of eight.
He spent prolonged stints unemployed until he landed a job in
2004 developing games at what became King Digital Entertainment
PLC, the maker of "Candy Crush Saga," where he honed his
games-development skills. He struck out on his own five years
later, launching Minecraft and founding Mojang.
He now owns the firm with Carl Manneh and Jakob Porser, early
Mojang employees. It employs about 40 people and had revenue in
2013 of about $290 million. Profit was $114 million, excluding the
$115 million in fees that Mojang paid Mr. Persson last year for the
right to license Minecraft.
Unlike many other gaming companies, Mojang charges a flat price
to download Minecraft on a personal computer or mobile phone or
onto a gaming console like Microsoft's Xbox.
Mr. Persson, burly and bearded, has declined numerous interview
requests and has appeared in only a handful of interviews over the
years, including a short, independently produced documentary posted
to YouTube in 2011. He's frequently sighted playing pool at
Mojang's offices in the hip Södermalm neighborhood in Stockholm.
The office, decked out as an English country club, sports
old-fashion oil portraits of each staff member.
Mr. Persson comes off as shy and introverted, and isn't one to
say much to strangers. On Twitter and his blog, he's more
outspoken.
Mr. Persson was born in 1979 in Farsta, a working-class
neighborhood in southern Stockholm. His mother was a nurse, and his
father suffered periodic bouts of drug abuse throughout his life
until his suicide in 2011.
When Mr. Persson was a child, the family moved to Edsbyn, a town
a few hours north of the capital, where he would spend time walking
around in the thick Swedish pinewood forests, "basically getting
lost," he said in the YouTube documentary.
School wasn't a priority. At the age of eight, he developed his
first game, a text-based adventure game, according to the YouTube
documentary and the biography. At 13, he set his mind on making
computer games for a living. He studied print media at a vocational
secondary school in Stockholm, but his grades weren't good enough
to get him into college.
"When I was really young, I think I said I wanted to become a
cop or something. But I kind of always knew I wanted to make
games," he said in the 2011 documentary. "I told that to my school
career counselor, but she said 'that is probably never going to
happen.'"
Instead of school, he embedded himself into the nascent gaming,
hacking and coding subculture that was blossoming in Stockholm. A
state-sponsored program in Sweden was aimed at subsidizing things
like personal-computer purchases and the rollout of high-speed
Internet networks, turning the country into an early tech hub.
Mr. Persson hopped between programming gigs until he joined
King, at the time a small, Stockholm-based game developer. There,
he met Jakob Porser, who would later come to work with him at
Mojang.
He left King in 2009 to focus on his own projects, one of which
was inspired by his childhood passion building Legos. He launched a
rudimentary version of Minecraft--in which players create virtual
universes out of pixilated bricks--the same year.
Jens Bergensten, a game maker who took over from Mr. Persson as
lead developer for Minecraft in 2011, was mesmerized when he first
downloaded the game from Mr. Persson's bare-bones website and
played it with a friend for four days straight when they were both
sick.
Mr. Persson founded Mojang in 2009, bringing aboard Mr. Manneh
as chief executive. Mr. Manneh worked at a small Swedish online
photo-album company that gave Mr. Persson part-time work while he
working on Minecraft.
"There was a point at the [photo album] office when Markus took
me aside and said he really needed to focus on this game of his. He
told me about the success, what kind of numbers he had. Then I
realized that this will be big," Mr. Manneh said in the YouTube
documentary.
Messrs. Bergensten, Porser and Manneh weren't available to
comment for this article.
While extremely shy in face-to-face encounters, Mr. Persson has
developed an outsize online personality that is help build his cult
following. Addressing his personal wealth thanks to Minecraft in a
post on Reddit a year ago, he said he had run out of ideas about
what to do with all his money.
"Now, all of the sudden, as a result of how modern society
works, I managed to somehow earn a s--ton of money. I still like
playing games and programming, and once I had the latest computer
and consoles, there really isn't much more to spend the money on
than traveling," he said.
In the summer of 2014, he paid almost 30 million kronor ($4
million) for a penthouse apartment in Stockholm's posh Östermalm
district.
He's also taken to Twitter to ridicule Microsoft's Windows 8 in
several tweets in 2012, though he has also praised the company as a
gaming partner. He also attacked Facebook Inc. after it purchased
virtual-reality-device maker Oculus this year, claiming that
Facebook was more interested in building user numbers than making
games. He publicly said he was "over Facebook" a few months
later.
Lisa Fleisher
and Evelyn M. Rusli contributed to this article.
Write to Jens Hansegard at jens.hansegard@wsj.com and Sven
Grundberg at sven.grundberg@wsj.com
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