Notch Hangs up His Pickaxe
By Kyle Mann | December 3, 2011 | News | 1 comment | Share
Notch, a.k.a. Markus Persson, has relinquished his position as lead designer of the wildly successful indie game Minecraft. The Swedish game design sensation announced on his Tumblr account on Friday that fellow Mojang developer Jens Bergensten would be taking the reins of the game’s development going forward, as Notch continues to help out and move onto other projects within the company:
We’ve been working together on Minecraft for a year now, and I’m amazed at how much in synch we two are when it comes to how to design the game. And when we don’t agree, we discuss it and something much better comes out at a result. He’s truly a great person to work with, and I feel very confident handing over the leadership of Minecraft to him.Notch
Since Mr. Persson founded Minecraft development studio Mojang AB in 2009, the company’s seen explosive growth as the sandbox building game found tremendous success with its innovative alpha funding model. Having been in various stages of incompleteness since May of 2009, Minecraft was officially released in its full form on November 18 of this year, at which time the game had sold over 4,000,000 copies. In addition to Android, iOS, and Xbox 360 ports, the game inspired the official Minecraft convention and several similar games from other developers in the genre.
Though it’s tempting to feel a twinge of sadness as Notch moves on, he’ll still be heavily involved with Minecraft, Scrolls, and other Mojang projects. And if I received my own Team Fortress 2 headwear item, I’d feel pretty confident to make whatever decisions I felt like too.
Ehhhh, the success was/is getting to his head a bit. I mean, the whole yogscast incident proves it outright. So I'm glad he's stepped down abit.