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  • 2009 - Minecraft - Analysis of the game itself, as opposed to the story of its creation.

 

 

 

 

 

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.
  • 2009.04 - Infiniminer is released.
  • 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)

 

 

 

  • 2010.12.02 - indiepubgames.com - Et Tu, Minecraft?
    • TIGSource forum discussion
    • 2010.12.02 - Reddit discussion of the indiepub article - What Minecraft and Farmville have in common
    • A very interesting article.

    •  

      consider a common experience in the game: you’re deep underground, digging a tunnel, hoping to find something valuable. And for every block you hack away, you have some small, pre-randomized chance of uncovering something valuable. Re-read that, and let the horror dawn on you: even in Minecraft, the messiah of indie games, there’s a slot machine hidden in the core mechanics!

      I’ve felt its hypnotizing allure firsthand. I spend hours chipping away with a pickaxe, happy to find resources that I’ll never use and thrilled to discover ore that’s both extremely rare and *explicitly useless*. The best find is diamond, which will let me play the slot machine even faster. Awesome! And if I grind for long enough, I get to customize the game world. Sounds almost like Farmville!

      there's undeniably some aspects of grinding and gambling, and I find it fascinating that a game that I so love can contain design techniques that I so loathe. I’m left wondering: what would happen if we removed the time sinks and the slot machines? Could Minecraft be made pure?

      We can already get a taste of that with the game’s Creative mode, in which the player gets an infinite pile of every resource and is set loose to build whatever he or she wants. There’s no need to spend time digging, so you escape the need to gamble for the good stuff. And people have fun with Creative mode! But not as much fun, usually. I played primarily in the default mode. My castle is a pretty significant piece of work (or at least a ridiculous time investment), built from tens of thousands of blocks lovingly collected one by one. Any idiot could build that castle on Creative mode, I snort derisively, but it takes an especially *dedicated* idiot to build it under default settings. And for some reason, the fact that I spent (read: wasted) so much time on that castle makes it more special to me.

 

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.]
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