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

Subscribe to WSJ: http://online.wsj.com?mod=djnwires

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