Notch / Markus Persson / Minecraft

Timeline of his success

2003 - Notch and a friend release a Beta for a complicated open-world sandbox game called "Wurm Online".
- "All items are made from materials from the world: wood cut from trees, rocks and metal mined from tunnels, and so forth. Wurm allows players to terraform the land, raising, flattening, and lowering tiles using shovels. Players can also mine underground and make vast caverns, climb mountains, build keeps and cities, and form new kingdoms (on some servers)." (Source)
- "The first time I tried out Wurm Online, it was at the suggestion of Beau Hindman, who found out that I was a lover of all things sandbox. I jumped into the game with no tutorial and zero guidance, and I hated it."- Shawn Schuster, a Massively.com journalist. (Source)
2005(?) - Notch starts working for King.com, makers of the simple-to-learn and hugely-successful game Candy Crush.
2006 - Wurm Online is released.
2007 - Notch leaves the company developing Wurm Online.
2009(?) - Notch quits his job with King.com.
2009.05 - Notch releases a simple-to-learn open-world sandbox game called "Minecraft".
- Minecraft looks like what you would expect to see if Wurm Online and Candy Crush had a baby.
2009.05-06 - Over the next month, Notch comments repeatedly in the forum, keeping Minecraft at the top of the forum.
2009.10 - Notch publishes a blog post in which he describes his "heavy focus on accessibility". (Source)

2009.10.30 - Notch's Blog - The Origins of Minecraft

Notch's Twitch.tv casts
http://www.twitch.tv/notch/profile/past_broadcasts

2015.04.01 - Daily Mail - Revealed, tragic past of the man who built Minecraft
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article ... rties.html

Around this time, the family left the wilderness of Edsbyn and returned to Stockholm. At some point, the demons that haunted Markus' father returned too and he fell back into the spiral of drink and drugs. [Nathan: This reminds me a LOT of my idea that there need to be different environments around a country set up for people who need different levels of separation from certain addictive substances. For example, I hate being around bread and candy because I have a lot of trouble resisting eating it.]