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

skills could make changes to the game, and soon, innumerable downloadable copies and variations of Infiniminer began cropping up. For Zachary Barth, the problem was not economic—he had never hoped to make a ton of money from Infiniminer —it was that he lost control of how his game developed. Each of the variations of Infiniminer circulating on the Internet had small, incompatible differences. Two players with different versions installed could never be sure that they would be able to play with each other. Zachary Barth’s plans of building a large and living multiplayer community around Infiniminer became impossible. The American programmer made the best of the situation and released Infiniminer as open source code, and gave his blessing to the game’s fans to continue developing it as they wished.
    After Markus became familiar with Infiniminer , he immediately sat down and began recoding his own game. He changed the third-person perspective to a first-person point of view and redid the graphics to make them even more blockish. It was a step away from the traditional strategy game he’d picked from his models and toward a more adventure-oriented setup. After a couple of days of frantic coding, Markus leaned back in his chair, satisfied as he saw the puzzle pieces beginning to fall into place. Building, digging, and exploring took on a totally new dimension when players saw the world through the eyes of their avatars.
    In early May 2009, Markus uploaded a video recording of a very early version of Minecraft on YouTube. It didn’t look like much more than a half-finished system for generating worlds and Markus gleefully jumping around inside it, but still, the essence of it hinted at how the game might look when it was done.
    “This is a very early test of an Infiniminer clone I’m working on. It will have more resource management and materials, if I ever get around to finishing it,” is Markus’s description of the clip.
    Someone on the fringes might regard what Markus did as intellectual-property theft. Without beating around the bush, he revealed where he found his inspiration and even went as far as to call Minecraft a clone of an existing game. But game developers, more than other kinds of artists, often find their starting point in an existing idea that they then work on, change, and polish. All studios, large and small, keep tabs on what their competitors are doing and frequently borrow from their games. Still, game developers seldom accuse others of plagiarizing. Almost all platform games originate from the mechanics that Nintendo put in place in the first Super Mario Bros. , released in 1985. And more or less all role-playing games build on the structure that was developed in games such as The Bard’s Tale . That’s why Zachary Barth refuses to single out Markus as a thief. He even speaks about how he himself used Team Fortress 2 and the indie game Motherload as inspiration for Infiniminer . Actually, he’s tired of the constant questions about if he feels ripped off considering the millions of players and dollars that Minecraft has pulled in.
    “The act of borrowing ideas is integral to the creative process. There are games that came before Infiniminer and there are games that will come after Minecraft . That’s how it works,” says Barth.
    About this time Markus, after discussing the matter with some friends at the TIGSource forum, decided to call his game Minecraft . The name was a combination of the words mine , for mining ore in shafts, and craft , as in building or creating something. The name is also a wink at Blizzard’s strategy games Warcraft and StarCraft , and the enormously successful online role-playing game World of Warcraft . Initially, the game had the subtitle Order of the Stone , a reference to the online series Order of the Stick , of which Markus was a fan, but that idea was scrapped before the game was released to the public.
    Markus was convinced that he was onto something big,