Minecraft: The Unlikely Tale of Markus "Notch" Persson and the Game that Changed Everything Read Online Free PDF Page A

both his dad and sister gone, there was plenty of room, and the place was quiet enough for him to sit undisturbed at his computer.
    Ritva remembers him saying once, “Mom, I’m going to live with you my whole life.” She could see how the years would pass without Markus getting either a job or an apartment. Oh, my God, what a nightmare ,she thought. But she just smiled, and her son shuffled back into his room and sat down in front of the computer.
    Ritva didn’t try to throw Markus out, but she did try to at least get him out of the house during the day. Every day, she opened the free newspaper, Metro, and carefully read through the ads for courses. When she saw one that was for programming, she signed him up without asking him if he was interested. After a few failed attempts, she finally got Markus to go to a short course on the programming language C++.
    Markus also continued working on his own games, and he’d come a long way since his first attempts with text adventures. He had become a skilled amateur coder, experimenting with small, simple games that tested new, original ideas. Markus started competing in game-development contests, where the goal was to develop a game in a short time using the least amount of code possible. It forced him to think economically—just the kind of fast-paced programming he liked so much. The aim was not to make money, and he didn’t. It was more about getting attention and recognition from other amateur developers.
    Luckily enough, the IT industry soon began to rise from the ruins of the crash. Markus took an opportunity to work at the fringes of the gaming industry, at a company called Gamefederation. It was not a game-developing company—Gamefederation worked with systems for game distribution. But now and then, Markus would get the chance to create small game prototypes in order to test a system’s functions. These creations haven’t been saved for posterity, but for the first time Markus was getting paid for something that at least resembled game programming, and that, he liked.
    When Markus was hired at Gamefederation, another developer, Rolf Jansson, had already started working there. Rolf quickly became Markus’s closest colleague, despite their drastically different backgrounds. Unlike Markus, Rolf already had substantial work experience. Before ending up at Gamefederation with Markus, he had been a consultant at IBM—a dream job for many. The pay had been great and, being a successful employee of one of the world’s largest IT companies, his future would have been secure. Nevertheless, Rolf, just like Markus, dreamed of working with games.
    Rolf remembers Markus as being shy and quiet, but a nice guy. It was when the two of them began talking about games that Markus lit up, and they had a lot to talk about. Markus got Rolf to play Counter-Strike , and Rolf showed Markus his favorite games. Soon, the two of them began staying late after work, playing multiplayer games on the company’s network. Sometimes they sacrificed a lunch and went over to The Science Fiction Bookstore, in Stockholm’s Gamla stan (the Old Town), where they bought cards for Magic: The Gathering. Between game sessions, they would talk at length about what was missing from the games available on the market, and together they could envision the perfect game and figure out what it was that the next hit game needed.
    Markus stayed at Gamefederation for four years. He then got the chance to enter the game industry for real when he interviewed for a then-unknown company, Midasplayer. The little he’d heard about it was promising. At Midasplayer, each developer was responsible for his or her own games. On top of that, Markus liked that the company focused on making small games to be played online. It sounded like what he’d been doing on his own for years without earning a cent. Everything seemed to be falling into place; they just needed to hire him.

 
    Chapter 4
    Games Worth Billions
    “Do you know