Happy birthday, us!
One year ago, we started Mojang. Back then, Minecraft had sold between half a million and one million copies, and now we’re up to almost four million copies sold, we’re expanding to two new platforms, and we’re getting good progress done with our new game. In one month, we’re going to Las Vegas to celebrate the full release of Minecraft with our fans. And we’re getting sued by one of my favorite game developers.
I started working on Minecraft in the summer of 2009, starting with a top-down isometric mining game. The elevator pitch for the game was “Dwarf Fortress meets Rollercoaster Tycoon meets Dungeon Keeper”. It was an interesting game for sure that I’d still like to see someone make, but then I played a game called Infiniminer and realized the first person perspective with blocky graphics worked really well and started prototyping it. The game went from being about controlling a team of characters to being a single player first person experience, with a focus on resource gathering and a somewhat coherent fantasy setting that would provide hopefully constant challenges and things to do.
After a little more than half a year of working on the game, people started talking about it and paying attention to it, so I was able to quit my day job and focus on it full time. I got flown out to Seattle to talk to Valve (and Bungie, as a bonus! :D). Valve’s one of the places I’d absolutely love to work at, the people are really nice and creative, and their new offices are amazingly nerd friendly. But I decided to instead focus on doing my own thing, called Jakob, and told him to quit his job.
Daniel joined, then Carl, then me and Jakob took a short field trip to Uppsala to meet with Junkboy, then Daniel suggested Jens, and all of the sudden we’re 12 people in the office, with three more signed up. We’re looking for a bigger office now. Fun!
We’re officially one year old now, and things are more fun than ever. :D Thank you, everyone working at Mojang. You may miss morning meetings sometimes, and some of you have horrible taste in music, but I love you all! And, of course, none of this would’ve been possible without the players and the fans, so thank you, person reading this!
Also, we’ve won a big pile of awards. ;-D
