This is the dream, right? A game designer and coder, working completely alone and outside of a commercial context, hits on a concept that sets the world alight. It becomes a culture-saturating phenomenon that entertains millions, maybe billions, of people, and expands the popular notions of who games are for and what they can be. Pure inspiration; an untrammelled lightning-bolt of creative genius that inspires the world and makes its creator famous and rich.
I think it has only ever happened twice. You can’t even put the achievements of, say, Shigeru Miyamoto in the same bracket. The creator of Mario was working collaboratively, with Takashi Tezuka and many others, as a salaried employee making products, however divinely inspired.
The first time it happened was in Russia in the 1980s, when Alexey Pajitnov created Tetris. The second time was in Sweden in the late 2000s, when Markus “Notch” Persson created Minecraft. One or other of these is the best-selling game of all time, depending on whether you aggregate the sales of all of Tetris’ different versions or not. Nothing else can touch them.
The circumstances of the two games’ creation were different in some ways. Pajitnov was an academic researcher working under a Communist regime that granted him no rights to his own work. Persson was a jobbing game programmer living in a liberal, capitalist society. In other ways they were similar. Both were noodling around with ideas in their spare time when inspiration struck. Pajitnov wondered how to turn the physical tetromino puzzle into a computer game; Notch envisioned combining a freeform, block-based mining game with a sandbox role-playing and simulation game hybrid like Dwarf Fortress.
Whole books have been written about how each of these games broke out; we can hit fast-forward. Tetris simply obsessed anyone who laid their hands on it, including Henk Rogers, the buccanneering programmer and businessman who helped bring it to the world. Conceived in the internet age, Minecraft’s path to public acclaim was simpler: It became a viral hit while still in alpha. The rest, in both cases, was just scale and contract negotiations.
The problem that then faced both men was what to do next. In Pajitnov’s case, this was complicated by his struggle to gain rights over, and remuneration for, his work in the first place. It was plainly unfair — guess what, Soviet communism didn’t work! — but with the help of his friend Rogers, he got through it. All the while, he labored to come up with another genius idea. There was Hatrix — Tetris with hats! There was Hexic — Bejeweled with hexagons! (Actually, Hexic rules.) None of them stuck.
It must, on some level, have been humiliating. But ultimately, Pajitnov relaxed into his role as a kind of statesman of Tetris, the smiling, chuckling, beneficent uncle who bestowed this one great gift on the world. He worked with Rogers to manage the game’s licensing and basked in the reflected glory when other designers made brilliant interpretations of it, like Tetsuya Mizuguchi’s Tetris Effect.
By contrast, Minecraft made Notch unimaginably rich within the span of five years. Initially, he seemed to relish developing the game alongside the community in alpha. But it seemed as though he quickly came to resent Minecraft’s success, or at any rate, he had some other need to distance himself from it. The game had its first public alpha release in late 2009; almost immediately after it hit full release in November 2011, Notch handed it over entirely to another programmer and designer, Jens Bergensten.
Notch tried to make a few other games at Mojang, the studio he’d founded as Minecraft took off. There was Scrolls (later Caller’s Bane), a card game that did eventually come out to a modest reception. There was a demo called Cliffhorse, little more than a gag. There was a sandbox space game called 0x10c (catchy) that he canned after a year’s work. But Minecraft inevitably consumed life at Mojang, and Notch didn’t enjoy overseeing his baby. “Anyone want to buy my share?” he tweeted. In November 2014, just five years after the game’s first public release, Notch sold Mojang to Microsoft for $2.5 billion.
The extra distance and the billions of dollars didn’t help. He founded a new company, and has publicly discussed a few different projects, but no games have come of it in over a decade. He bought a Beverly Hills mansion with a wall of candy dispensers. His public persona curdled as he made racist, sexist, and homophobic comments online, and endorsed conspiracy theories. (Notch has spoken of experiencing severe isolation and depression after Minecraft’s success.) Microsoft and Mojang distanced themselves from him, scrubbing his name from the game.
It’s a very sad story. It isn’t surprising or shameful that Pajitnov and Notch weren’t able to replicate Tetris and Minecraft’s success; their genius is unrepeatable, and it inevitably dwarfs any subsequent effort, however worthy it might be. It must be a strange thing to realize, in your 30s or 40s, that you have made your one great contribution to society, that you’re done, and that you cannot disown or unmake it. It must warp your sense of purpose.
Pajitnov seems to have made his peace with that. Notch seems not to have. On one level, this is a matter of character: of the maddening, complex mystery that makes up a human being and determines their reactions to life events. There’s no lesson to be learned from that, other than the importance of consideration and empathy.
On another level, though, it’s a story about art and systems of ownership. Pajitnov had to fight for the right to call Tetris his own while dozens of other interests, commercial and bureaucratic, were also scrapping over it and pulling it in various different directions. It was hard and unjust, but maybe it taught him the value of what he’d made.
Nobody ever disputed that Minecraft was Notch’s, and the money poured into his pockets. That was right and deserved. But in the supercharged environment of 21st-century capitalism and online fandoms, it never felt less like his. He couldn’t get rid of it fast enough. His exit made him stratospherically wealthy but cut him off from what should be the greatest and proudest achievement of his life.
To be rewarded for Tetris, Pajitnov had to fight for it, hold it close, and nurture it. To be rewarded for Minecraft, Notch was incentivized to turn his back on it. Good job, capitalism.
Minecraft is still great — Microsoft has done a good job as its custodian, for once — but something is wrong. It’s played and adored by millions of people, children especially. Both my kids are obsessed with it. They’re probably playing it right now, sculpting its infinitely malleable world with their imaginations. What a gift to the world! And Markus “Notch” Persson’s name isn’t even in the credits.
One and Done
In a world where sequels reign supreme, these singular hits stand alone
