Mojang's Minecraft

I had been working as a game programmer at king.com for four and a half years, making games both at work and during my free time. When I started that job, we were eight people, and when I left, we were 10 times as many. Initially, my hobby game development wasn't a problem for the company, but once they informed me that they technically owned all games I made during my free time and any prizes I won in competitions, I quit.

I got a job at a more liberal company as a web developer, so I could focus a bit more on my hobby. Initially, Minecraft started out as a top-down strategy game where you moved characters around in a dynamic cube-based world, kind of like a crossover between Dwarf Fortress and Rollercoaster Tycoon.

While playing around with a first-person mode, I realized the world was much more interesting as a first-person adventure game. The low-resolution textures I had used got really blurry and awful, so I thought I had to try to get some higher resolution art. It wasn't until playing Infiniminer that I realized I could just turn off the texture smoothing and end up with a charming pixely look, and that's how the seeds of what Minecraft is today were born. After talking about it on a couple of Internet forums I frequent, and putting out a free alpha version for a few weeks, I decided to try to charge for the game, and added premium accounts. Initially, these had very minor benefits over free accounts. I sold about five to ten per day. Over time, the sales increased to 15, which was enough to support me full time, so I dropped down to part time on my day job and spent three days per week on Minecraft.

Then it sold 30 copies per day. Then 50. I quit my day job and went full time on Minecraft exactly one year after leaving the job at king.com. Now it's seven months later, we just released the beta version, I've started a game studio with a couple of friends, and we've hired a few talented people.

If you've never played it, Minecraft is a sandbox fantasy adventure game set in a world...