The developer of
Minecraft, Markus
Persson aka Notch, had previously worked on games such as Wurm Online and as a game developer for King.com for over four years.[9][10]
Persson quit his job at King.com in order to independently develop
Minecraft.[9][11] Persson
was inspired to create Minecraft by several other games such as Dwarf Fortress, Infiniminer by Zachtronics Industries, and Dungeon Keeper by Bullfrog
Productions. He was still working out the basics of gameplay when he
discovered Infiniminer and played with others on the TIGSource.com
forums.[10][11] At the
time, he had also been visualizing an isometric 3D building game that would be a
cross between his inspirations and had made some early prototypes.[9][12] After
discovering Infiniminer, Persson declared, "My god, I realized that that
was the game I wanted to do."[13]
Infiniminer heavily influenced the style of gameplay that eventually
resulted in Minecraft, including the first-person aspect of the game and
the "blocky" visual style.[11]
Minecraft was
first released to the public on May 17, 2009, as a developmental "alpha" release,[14] with a beta release on December 20,
2010.[15][16] Although
Persson maintained a day job with Jalbum.net at first, he later moved to working
part-time and has since quit in order to work on Minecraft full-time as
sales of the beta version of the game have expanded.[10]
Persson continues to update the game with releases distributed to users
automatically. Persson plans to continue these updates after the release of the
full game as long as there is still an active userbase.[11] These
updates have included features such as new items, new blocks, an alternate "Hell" dimension (accessible through
construction of a portal) that Persson terms "The Nether",
tameable wolves that assist the
player, and changes to the game's behaviour (e.g., how water flows). Persson
plans to eventually release the game as open-source after sales have dropped off
and when he wants to move onto other projects.[10]
In September 2010
Persson announced that he and a friend were starting a video game company, Mojang, with the money earned from
Minecraft. This company was intended to back the development of
Minecraft and an unrelated game, Scrolls, which his friend was to
primarily work on. As part of creating the company, Persson hired "an artist, a
web site developer, and a business guy", additional programmers, and established
an office in Stockholm.[17][18] The four
additional employees hired in 2010 were Jens Bergensten, a programmer; Daniel
Kaplan, the "business guy"; Jakob Porser, who will be working on the other game
for Mojang; and Markus "Junkboy" Toivonen, a pixel artist.[19][20][21] The plans
for Persson's new company were delayed by weeks when his account with PayPal, containing over US$763,000 in
proceeds from Minecraft sales, was frozen due to a "suspicious withdrawal
or deposit".[22] On
October 20, 2010, the Minecraft website suffered a prolonged DDoS
attack.[23][24]
On December 11, 2010,
Persson announced, via his personal blog, that Minecraft would be
entering its beta testing phase on December 20, 2010.[25] He
further stated that users who bought the game after this date would no longer be
guaranteed to receive all future content free of charge as it "scared both the
lawyers and the board." However, bug fixes and all updates leading up to and
including the release would still be free. At the start of 2011 Mojang expanded
to include Carl Manneh as a "managing director" and Tobias Möllstam as a
programmer.[26]
On April 7, 2011, Persson announced that Mojang has decided to move the game out
of Beta on November 11, 2011; however this would not be the "finished product",
as the game would be continuously updated before and after the release.[27][non-primary
source needed]
Minecraft.net provided
online systems to authenticate logins and host the player's profile including
its modifiable character skin pattern and the purchased gift codes. On January
18, 2011, Persson announced in a blog post that Minecraft's web servers would be switching to being
hosted solely on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) content delivery network. Persson
stated in his personal blog that their old web host was having trouble and that
Mojang would be switching to using AWS as their host for both Minecraft.net and
Minecraft's web functions such
as logging in.[28] This was
followed by a tweet the next day confirsk to oversee the servers and back end
for both Minecraft and Scrolls.ming the migration and that Tobias
would be the one to set up the new servers.[29] Upon this
hosting migration, both Minecraft.net and Minecraft game features
experienced fluctuating down time.[30] On February
21, Mojang hired Dan Fri
On December 2, 2011,
Persson announced via his personal blog that he would be stepping down as the
lead developer of Minecraft, with Bergensten becoming lead developer.
Persson would remain as a developer of Minecraft but would be taking time
away from the game in order to work on an unannounced project.[31] On
February 28, 2012, Bergensten announced that the main developers of Bukkit, a
community-based project that works on Minecraft server implementation,
joined the ranks of the Mojang team to work on "improving both the server and
the client to offer better official support for larger servers and server
modifications".[32]
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