Free Minecraft: The Unlikely Tale of Markus "Notch" Persson and the Game that Changed Everything by Daniel Goldberg, Linus Larsson

ready-made challenges.
    Then there was Wurm Online of course. The similarities between Minecraft and the game Markus designed with Rolf Jansson a couple of years earlier are unmistakable. In both, the player has almost complete freedom to alter the world according to his or her own whim. Like Minecraft , there are few built-in tasks or challenges to undertake in Wurm Online . The player is expected to create his or her own goals for the game alone or, if so desired, in collaboration with others.
    In the spring of 2007, Markus dropped out of Wurm Online . Rolf had moved from Stockholm to Motala a few years earlier, the two were seeing less of each other, and Markus knew that the big decisions about the game’s development were increasingly in Rolf’s hands. Besides, his Midasplayer job kept him busy.
    Rolf was disappointed. Wurm Online had just begun to pull in enough money to give him a decent full-time salary. The sudden resignation of one of the game’s founders, the friend with whom he’d worked for more than three years, was a huge blow. Initially, Markus had a bad conscience about it—it was hard not to feel like he had left his old friend in the lurch. He retained a small part of his ownership in the shared company, but turned over the rest to Rolf. A Band-Aid on the sore if nothing else, he thought.
    But now, in front of the computer with Dwarf Fortress on the screen, Markus’s thoughts were fully focused on the next project—on amusement parks, medieval catacombs, and dwarf warriors, that is to say. All that remained was to put together something new and entertaining.
    At first, Markus sketched a game world that was, like many other strategy games, viewed from above. In Markus’s game, the building and exploring would occur in a three-dimensional world a good deal more inviting and easy to understand than that of Dwarf Fortress . But the player would still control the action like an omnipotent god with a mouse, rather than seeing the world from the perspective of one’s avatar.
    That changed a couple of days later. Like most evenings after work, Markus was on the computer when he stumbled upon an indie game he hadn’t tried before. It was called Infiniminer . Markus downloaded the game, installed and clicked it into motion, and then almost fell off his chair. “Oh my God,” he thought. “This is genius.”
    Like Minecraft , Infiniminer involves digging and building. The game is enacted in square, blocky worlds automatically generated before each play. Every individual block can be picked loose from the environment and assembled into something new. Certain blocks, often the ones deep in the ground, contain rare minerals. Others are just dirt and rock to be dug through in the search for treasure.
    Recognize it? No surprise there. For anyone who has played Minecraft , the first encounter with Infiniminer is eerily familiar. The game was developed by American programmer Zachary Barth, and was released in late April 2009, just weeks before Minecraft saw the light of day. The two games’ graphics are nearly identical. There are brown dirt blocks, gray stone, and orange, bubbling lava that runs slowly over the ground.
    Infiniminer was originally intended as a multiplayer game, with different teams competing to collect the most precious minerals in the shortest time. Buildings were used as a way of sabotaging the competitors’ progress. But eventually players discovered that building was more fun than competing for points and they began to spend their time creating houses, castles, and other structures instead. Infiniminer quickly developed a devoted following, which included Markus, and in the spring of 2009, most signs pointed to Zachary Barth’s game being on its way to a breakthrough. But it didn’t get there, because of a particularly unhappy turn of events.
    Barely a month after Infiniminer was released, the game’s source code was leaked onto the Internet. This meant that anyone with enough programming