This article originally appeared in issue 246 of PC Gamer UK. Read our feature on the making of Minecraft here.

It’s hard to imagine how Minecraft could become any bigger than it already is, or how Mojang could spend the money if it did. Then the Mojang guys tell me. It sounds like a good plan.

Instead of indefinitely expanding Minecraft’s in-game content, Mojang intend to gift its future to the modders and tinkerers.

“I think we’re getting to a point where everything new I’m thinking of should probably be a mod,” says Minecraft’s helmsman Jens ‘Jeb’ Bergensten. “The features are getting more and more specific and not so useful to everyone. Adding new animals and monsters hasn’t felt like it’s extended the game – and maybe I should work on something more useful, even though I know animals or mobs are the most appreciated content. In the recent snapshot we added bats. They don’t really do anything, they just fly around and sit in roofs and sleep. But people are very happy about it.”



The modding community for Minecraft is already colossal and responsible for a huge volume of quality output. There are mods which add Pokémon, mods which add Portal guns, mods which add steampunk dirigibles. Custom maps, meanwhile, can completely upturn Minecraft’s ruleset, like the perilous, puzzley resource scramble of Sky Blocks, or the vicious PvP of The Hunger Games mod.

But the lack of official modding tools has meant the community’s offerings have been disparate, inconsistent, difficult for Minecraft’s less techy players to use and occasionally dangerous. The solution is to build an official mod API, enabling Mojang to endorse well-tested mods and offer them through a central repository in-game.

“Hopefully they will be easier to install and less prone to destroy your game,” says Markus ‘Notch’ Persson, Minecraft’s original creator.

This is no small task, however. Radical changes cannot be made to the game’s API after launch, so getting it (mostly) right first time is important. And getting it right means changing a lot of Minecraft’s basic infrastructure.

“We’re rewriting the rendering – basically rewriting the client side of Minecraft from scratch,” says Nathan ‘Dinnerbone’ Adams, who was hired from the community for his work on Bukkit, the most popular of Minecraft’s unofficial modding toolsets. “I think it’ll be a couple of months before we see the initial versions of the API.”



Jeb also talks of making it easier to add and animate models, and fundamentally changing the way the game stores data regarding its many materials and items. But though modders will dominate Minecraft’s future, for the short term at least, Mojang will continue to release weekly ‘snapshots’, optional downloads of unfinalised content, which continue to extend the game in unusual ways – or, more accurately, enable the players to do so.

“In the recent snapshot we’ve added something called the command block,” Jeb says. “When it’s triggered, you can teleport players to a certain position, or change the game mode. So this user called Sethbling has created a Team Fortress 2 map for Minecraft. You can choose a class, it has control points, and everything works like TF2. It’s quite amazing.”

But what’s critical about this process is putting the community’s most outlandish, most brilliant creations in the hands of all users – even those who are largely computer-naïve. The mod browser is one part of this, but Mojang are going further with a plan to offer private servers to players in-game.

“We want to make it easier for families and people with little knowledge of computers to create persistent servers,” says Jeb. “So we’ll integrate our own server provider in the game. We mentioned this before and I got a lot of emails from server provider companies scared that we would force them out of business. I can understand it might look that way, but our target audience is not the same. Our hosting service will probably be too simple for the hardcore who buy servers now; we’ll aim for servers with eight-to-ten people max.”



Patrick Geuder, Mojang’s data analyst, has been working hard to identify trends in how people play Minecraft – and, more importantly, when they quit. Tutorials designed to smooth out those bumps may well be in the offing. Meanwhile, platform-specific versions of Minecraft will evolve into bespoke experiences.

“For the iOS and Android version we’re always looking for how we can use the camera and the GPS,” says Daniel Kaplan, who handles business development at Mojang. “We’ve been thinking about trying to pixelate your surroundings using Google Maps data – it’ll be really cool to try to do it.”

And, serving as a fulcrum for all these developments, will be the revamped Minecraft website, helping to bring the most interesting community mods and custom maps to the surface.

Yet many of Minecraft’s forthcoming developments won’t involve a single line of code. In fact, despite being a game whose success was predicated on its availability as a digital download, you will soon see Minecraft for sale in the shops – not in a box, but as a voucher.





“We have a lot of comments from kids that say their parents won’t let them buy the game online,” Patrick explains. “So we’re looking to produce cards which allow you to buy the game with your pocket money instead.”

Then there’s the other major real-world extension of Minecraft: MineCon. Under the creative stewardship of Lydia ‘MinecraftChick’ Winters, the yearly conventions will continue as relatively small affairs.

“But we are working on an idea to help fans create their own fan events – a kind of TEDx-style programme, where you follow guidelines and apply for the MineCon brand. This year, however, we’re working on livestreaming so people can watch MineCon at home.”

While MineCon makes its way to the living room, other staff members at Mojang are hoping to bring Minecraft to the classroom.

“Early on there were teachers contacting us,” says Carl Manneh, CEO. “And one guy, Joel Levin, started showing videos of how he used Minecraft in education. Then a few Finnish teacher students built the Minecraft Edu mod, which gives teachers control of a classroom in Minecraft.”

It’s not the only social good for which Minecraft is being used: there’s also the recently announced collaboration with the UN.



“The plan is to build 300 public spaces in these problematic areas around the big cities in the world,” Manneh says. The designs for these spaces will be shaped by the input of the local community, invited to build their own vision within Minecraft.

Mojang are keen that their legacy is not limited to a single game, and that’s reflected not only in the increasingly ambitious applications of Minecraft but in the other projects underway at the studio. Scrolls is co-founder Jakob Porsér’s baby – a card battler designed to exist only in a digital space – while the mysterious 0x10c is Notch’s new squeeze: a space exploration and trading game of near-ludicrous ambition.

The company is aware that the more projects they take on, the larger they would have to grow – and they are reluctant to exceed their current intimate headcount.

“We have a few empty seats here, and I think we’ll fill those up and not much more,” Notch says. “If we get too many projects and need to hire more we should split up into separate studios and try to keep those teams small I think.”

One alternative to such a drastic future can be seen in their partnership with Oxeye, the developers behind Cobalt. More such collaborations are planned, publishing each game through a centralised Mojang account.

Is this intended to be an indie-fuelled alternative to Steam?

“The free competition on the PC has always been why I find it so appealing,” says Notch. “So I’m a bit torn. I’m a huge fan of Valve, and I think they’re doing everything for the right reasons. I just think they’re slightly too good at it.”



There are some clouds on the horizon, however. Mojang’s success has made it a target, and, currently, they are one of a large number of developers being sued for patent infringement by Uniloc.

“They want a licence fee for all sales, historically as well,” says Carl. “Obviously it’s a pain in the neck. It’s something that when starting this company we never imagined we’d need to handle. We’ve gone into a group of defendants and there is a firm in the US that represents all of us. So we just pay a huge sum of money every month to this lawyer firm and hopefully they’ll win.”

How bad would it be for Mojang if they lost?

“Not disastrous in a way that we’d have to put down the company,” says Carl. “I think the monetary effect wouldn’t be as bad as just... losing faith in humanity, really. But obviously the money would not be fun either.”

Mojang’s battle here is not simply for their own well-being – the precedent set by Uniloc’s victory could suffocate indie development as a whole. Notch’s attitude, which he duly Tweeted, is that “Innovation within software is basically free, and it’s growing incredibly rapid. Patents only slow it down.”

It’s fitting then that the true future of Minecraft is not really in Notch’s hands, or those of anyone at Mojang, but in the hands of its community, who will continue to chip bits off, build bits on the side, and mould it into countless shapes. The future of the game Mojang made is a game that makes itself.

And now for a Kickstarter that isn't about space, or bringing back the Old Ways - in fact, this is probably one of the most innovative projects on the site. Sportsfriends is a collection of clever party games, four of them to be exact, including Johann Sebastian Joust, which doesn't even rely on a visual display. The four games' four developers are asking for a modest - well, by space sim standards - $150,000, around a quarter of which they've already achieved.

The Kickstarter page will give you the full details, but we'll briefly run through the included games, and why you should probably be excited. Johann Sebastian Joust is a game you've probably only heard of if you're invited to trendy indie festivals, which is criminal because it looks like a lot of fun. I described it in a webgame round-up as "a cross between musical chairs and stuck-in-the-mud"; it uses extra-sensitive Playstation Move controllers in lieu of a screen.

Super Pole Riders will be an expanded version of Bennett Foddy's free browser game Pole Riders, which you should play if you like weird physics and hating yourself. Foddy also made QWOP, GIRP and my personal favourite CLOP, which coincidentally are the noises you'll make as you repeatedly fail at each one. Barabariball, on the other hand, is a Smash Bros-esque fighting/sports game, while Hokra is described as a "minimalist digital sports game".

All four will be coming to PC, Mac and Linux shortly after the PlayStation 3 release. (That's expected to be in Autumn 2013 - providing the collection reaches its Kickstarter total, of course.) Pitch video, as usual, below.

A basic pull out into the long lane

One of the reasons why the MOBA genre sits so far away from the rest of the games community is that it's full of skills that don't have much crossover with other game types. A veteran FPS player, with thousands of hours of Counterstrike under his or her belt, will be as flummoxed by a game of Dota 2 as someone who's only ever played the Sims.

One of the weird skills inherent to the genre is pulling. This isn't like MMO-style pulling, where you aggro a group of monsters and run back to your team who rip them apart. Instead, it's the process of dragging your creeps into the jungle to be killed by neutral camps of monsters that'll attack anything that moves.

The idea is that by killing your own units, you're preventing the enemy from getting the xp they would otherwise have got for killing them. It also has the side benefit of letting heroes in the early game kill tougher neutral enemies than they would be able to normally.

It's one of the skills that elevates a Dota 2 noob up to the level of intermediate, and in pro games it's used constantly to keep the balance of power in a lane in a team's favour. If you've over-pushed your lane, then you can bring the battle lines back to a safer spot with a well-timed pull.

A well-stacked camp

It's also often combined with stacking, where you pull neutral creeps away from their den just as they respawn, doubling the amount present and increasing the amount of xp a jungler can attain at once. A good support laning with a carry will be repeatedly stacking creep camps so that the carry can later stomp through the jungle racking up vast amounts of experience in a short space of time.

I've never been too good at pulling. It requires pinpoint precision with timing, smart positioning awareness, good communication with your team (which is a rarity in public games), and deep knowledge of the map. So to improve my skills, I've been trying to follow a guide, produced by Reddit user Theloniusdotmonk, which describes the timings and methods necessary to pull almost every creep on the map.

The middle camps are easy -- they can be pulled directly into a lane at the :15 and :45 second marks. If they're not stacked beforehand, then your creeps will likely win the fight and head back out into the lane, but if you stack the camp then a whole wave of your creeps will be denied to the enemy.

Getting this camp to connect with a creep wave is difficult

The difficult part comes when you chain-pull the other two nearby camps into your creeps just as they win that fight. Timing is crucial here -- too early and your creeps will die too quickly. Too late and they'll have headed back into the lane to give their juicy lives up to the enemy.

Then there's the Radiant mid-lane. By removing a couple of trees (using a quelling blade or some tangos) you can fairly easily pull the uppermost camp, but the lower hard camp is more tricky. Try as I might, I couldn't quite get the attention of my creeps, as the neutrals got bored of wailing on me and headed back home.

But the best pulls that most new players don't know about are in the top left of the map. The left-most camp can be pulled by either team at :23 or :53 (the later automatically stacking the camp as a bonus), allowing easy territorial control. If your creeps are killing those too easily, then it's a trivial task to chain-pull the next-nearest camp in too.

Bad timing scuppered this one

If you're constantly finding yourself with a lane pushed up against enemy towers, dying to ganks from the jungle, then use a well-timed pull to bring your lane back under control. You'll be surprised how effective it can be.

Having retired from world-saving heroics, Christopher Livingston is living the simple life in video games by playing a series of down-to-earth simulations. This week he faces a deep existential crisis: is he a tow truck driver... OR THE TOW TRUCK ITSELF?

In regard to the question mark in the title: I'm a little uncertain about this week's simulation. It's called Tow Truck Simulator, and it promises to place me "in the role of the driver and operator of a rescue truck." Thing is, as a player, I never get out of the tow truck and walk around, nor do I ever see myself sitting in the tow truck, nor are there any other human beings visible in the game anywhere: cars drive themselves and sidewalks are empty of pedestrians. So, I think maybe I am playing the part of a literal tow truck, as if this game were taking place in an eerie alternate world abandoned by humanity and filled with sentient automobiles, like in Pixar's terrifying horror movie Cars. Who am I? What am I? Am I MAN or TRUCK? Take my hand (my DOOR?) and we'll find out together.

The tutorial in Tow Truck Simulator is refreshingly brief: a giant green arrow points into the distance, as if to simply say: "Go. Explore. Discover. Live. Thou needest only the tools thou hast with you already." Or, maybe they just didn't feel like creating a tutorial. I follow the arrow, driving my truck (or am I driving MYSELF?) down the abandoned streets of whatever post-apocalyptic city this is.Turning a corner too quickly, my truck (SELF?) tips over and slides along on its side, eventually popping back up onto all four wheels (TRUCK FEET?).

Just takin' a truck nap.

Eventually, I spot the quest car illegally parked on a sidewalk, a gold icon hovering above it. I back up to the car, then scan the controls menu, trying to figure out how, exactly, I am meant to solve this dastardly case of crime-parking. There are controls for Crane, Tackler, Dock, Ramp, and Rope, and after some experimentation, I find that Dock, Ramp, and Rope don't do anything. I can, however, extend my crane, but not far enough to reach the car behind me, so I re-park next to the car and manage to snag it by the wheel wells. From there, it's a relatively simple matter to lift it up, move it over and place it on my truck bed (MY BACK?) disconnect the crane, and drive off.

This is about the last thing that goes well for me.

A problem, though, as I drive away: the car starts slowly sliding off the back of the truck. I stop, re-pick it with my crane, and set it back down, then scrutinize the controls menu again. There's a "Secure Load" key, so I press that, but as I drive off the car again starts sliding off. No matter how I move or adjust it, the car keeps trying to tumble off my truck-back. The solution I come up with: just leave the crane attached to the car.

Another problem, though: as I start driving, the car swings around wildly from the crane. Even at 12 MPH, the car is spinning and swinging behind me like an umbrella on a windy day. Distracted by the sight of a car swooping dangerously through the air behind me, I slam into a few other cars, then run a stop sign and get a notification from an invisible police officer that I've been fined 100 €. The officer apparently doesn't have an issue with the yellow sports car streaming around behind me like a child's balloon.

This is totally safe, right?

Well, at least there's no one around to endanger. I follow the quest arrow and find it pointing to what appears to be an abandoned building surrounded by a wall and a metal gate. It doesn't look like a place you'd tow cars to, and driving close to the gate doesn't make it open, and neither does nudging it with the front of my truck, and neither does repeatedly ramming it at full speed. Clearly, I've discovered a little glitch in the matrix: I don't think this arrow is pointing to the correct location. Well, maybe dropping the car over the gate will end the mission? That's how desperate I am to get rid of this stupid balloon car, that I actually tell myself dropping it over the fence will satisfy the green arrow of destiny.

I AM SO GOOD AT GAMES YOU GUYS

As anyone could have predicted, the car is sitting there on its side, probably horribly damaged, and the arrow is still stubbornly pointing inside the gate. I, too, am stubborn: I've decided not to restart the game or cancel the mission. I am going to tow this yellow car successfully: I have simply taken too many screenshots of it to do anything else. After tons of fussy re-parking, I manage to reach over the fence and retrieve the car, though I accidentally disconnect the crane in mid-air and it falls on the ground upside down. Seizing a rare opportunity, another car comes along and immediately tries to mate with it.

Rated M for Mature

Now the car I'm supposed to tow is upside-down under another car. Well, if there's a problem that can't be solved with some high speed ramming, I haven't found it yet! Except for that gate, earlier, that didn't work at all.



Finally, after some more picking and driving and wondering what to do about the errant quest arrow, I notice an option on the control menu titled "Recover." I tap the key, my truck immediately is parked nicely on the road, and the quest arrow suddenly points in a different direction, back to the tow truck company location where I started the game. I finally get the yellow car properly towed, and then I tow a blue car, and then a green one, and then I decide to take a short break from playing Tow Truck Simulator for the rest of my life.

Conclusion: I don't think I'm cut out to be a tow truck or a driver of one. Picking up cars with a crane is fun (picking up anything with a crane is fun), but there's just not much else to do in Tow Truck Simulator besides drive around eerily empty streets and get ticketed by invisible cops and encounter occasional bugs and glitches, like this one:

AaaaaAAAaaa! - A Reckless Disregard For Beta Testing

I do think there might be potential here for a good game, it needs a few more layers of simulation, some actual simulated people, and some interesting scenarios. BRAINSTORMING SESH:

You're about to tow a car that is double parked, but you notice, on the dashboard, a stethoscope and medical bag. Is this a heroic doctor who had to rush into a building to save a life, or a selfish jerk who didn't feel like parking properly while he bought a coffee? Moral quandary!
An uptight businessman begs you not to tow his car because he just lost his job, his girlfriend dumped him, his identity has been stolen, and he's been forced to live with a comically large St. Bernard that has destroyed his house and gotten covered with wet paint. Comedy movie quandary!
There's an asteroid headed for earth, and it's the exact same size and shape of a 1993 Ford Festiva. NASA is putting together a crew of the world's best tow truck operators to tow the asteroid out of its projected path. The President of the United States just asked you to save the world. Anyone want to say no?

The Molynews just keeps on coming. Fresh from the announcement that 22 Cans' Lost-like Curiosity experiment won't be coming to PC, Peter Molyneux has said to Beefjack that he's "only going to make one more game, I think." More than that, it's going to be the "defining game" of his career.

In the interview, he reveals that he has a name for that game, and a list of features, but it doesn't appear to have developed beyond that yet. However, it's clear what his intention is with the project:

"The thought of every ounce of my energy, every ounce of my experience, every mistake that I've made in every single game – if I can learn from that, and use that energy to make one game... that's what I'm trying to do." He went on to tell Beefjack that "We're going to make a game, we're going to learn what it is to make a game in today's world, and it's going to be the defining game of my career.” So probably not The Movies 2 then.

Before that, with his company 22 Cans he's making a series of small experiments. Curiosity - What's Inside The Cube? was the first, while the second will be a game called Co-operation. Thanks to server troubles, nobody's yet discovered what's lurking inside Molyneux's cube, but all signs point to it being a slowly revolving hologram of Phillip Schofield's head. That or the first season of Lost.

This article originally appeared in issue 246 of PC Gamer UK. Also check out our article on The Future of Minecraft

"I think I was already fucking rich by the time I realised, ‘I’m gonna be fucking rich.’" That’s how quickly it all happened for Markus ‘Notch’ Persson.

He’d made a game called Minecraft – you may have heard of it. It did rather well. Is doing, actually: three and a half years after the alpha version went on sale, Notch’s studio, Mojang, is still selling 43,420 copies every day, and that number continues to climb.

You’d be forgiven for thinking Notch was one lucky nerd. But unlike the stories of instant, frictionless wealth that are so popular in these recessionary times, luck plays the smaller part in the story of Minecraft’s meteoric rise. He’s more than a geek who stumbled into the zeitgeist and came away with a multi-million selling game. And Minecraft is now more than Notch. In fact, it’s now more than a game.

It’s at least two. One is a procedurally generated sandbox that can be sculpted at the players’ whim, enabling the cooperative construction of everything from architectural wonders to computing devices. The other takes that malleable world as its setting and imposes an RPG on top, forcing the player to scavenge for resources, craft tools to modify the landscape and fend off nefarious creatures.

Yet Minecraft is more even than this. Much of what it is exists outside the game Mojang have made: it’s a generously adapted platform for player creativity, spawning countless videos, maps, mods, spin-offs and clones. It’s a global community that meets online, in classrooms, activity centres, convention halls and, in the case of MineCon 2012, a themepark. It’s even an educational tool and an unusual conduit for urban regeneration projects.



Notch has not achieved all this by himself, as the power of his celebrity sometimes seems to suggest (Urban Dictionary defines ‘Notch’ as another word for Jesus). But if his status as the king of indie, amplified by his vocal and occasionally pugilistic presence on Twitter, has somewhat eclipsed the efforts of those around him, neither was Notch simply in the right place at the right time. He was also exactly the right guy: a talented, self-motivated programmer whose avid taste for games crisscrossed a Venn diagram of instant gratification, hardcore toil and DIY construction. At the centre of which, Minecraft squarely rests.

In fact, to hear of his early encounters with games makes Minecraft sound a little like destiny. His childhood furnished him with a Commodore 128, a glut of pirated games, and an ever-curious, dilettante father.

“My dad was one of those really nerdy people,” says Notch as we squeak back into the plush leather seats of Mojang’s boardroom – which, like the rest of the Stockholm-based studio, is decked with ironic ostentation: part gentleman’s club, part supergeek playpen.

“He’s the kind of person that just has new hobbies all the time. Like: ‘Oh, I’m going to start building my own fishing rods.’ He did that for a couple of years. And: ‘I’m going to learn computers,’ – and he builds his own modem.”

Perhaps, in some other universe, Notch is a fly-fishing champion. In this one, however, his diet of gaming segued quickly into a desire to create.



“I enjoyed Shoot ‘Em Up Construction Kit,” he recalls. “I couldn’t really make anything in it, but I used to like the sprite editor, doing animations that I didn’t even put in the game. I just animated weird stuff and played it back.”

Code samples in a Swedish computing magazine made Notch aware of more expansive possibilities. He and his sister copied this cryptic language into the Commodore to create rudimentary games.

“I figured out that if I made typos, it did something else,” he says. “That’s kind of how I learned programming. My big dream was always being able to make Doom. I was so impressed at the leap from Wolfenstein to Doom, both in game design and technology. I was just totally blown away – well, everyone was. Are we allowed to do this? Can games be this interesting? I guess I had real, actual dreams about making something like Doom.”

Though Notch’s entries to code-jams often dabble with 2.5D engines of Doom’s ilk, the releases he’s most commonly associated with could not be considered action games. Instead, they’re complex, sprawling systems, in which players are encouraged to invest hours upon hours of digital graft. In the case of Wurm Online, a game he co-developed with Rolf Jansson, the result was a world of dizzying richness, entirely created by a self-organising society of players.

It’s a gruelling experience, however. Everything in Wurm must be created from scratch, and the raw materials harvested. Doing so takes such a long time that a division of labour among cooperating players is the only way to achieve anything – but the game offers no helpful, predetermined structure for this, no foremen or leaders.





“With Wurm, Rolf and I wanted a game in which the player actually affected the world. MMOs are usually just parallel singleplayer campaigns basically – there is not much interaction going on. So we wanted something where it’s actually like: here’s a world, have fun. Well, not ‘have fun’ actually. Work really, really hard. Then it becomes fun, because you’re invested in it.”

Mass-market appeal, however? That’s not really Wurm’s thing. It could not be a day job. Instead, Notch earned his crust at King.com, a casual games company that has since become the second largest game developer on Facebook.

“I started working as their eighth employee, I think. I worked there for five years and made my own games on the side. Jakob joined something like a year after I got there.”

“Me and Markus just hit it off,” recalls Jakob Porsér, a fellow developer at King and a future co-founder of Mojang. They make a pleasingly asymmetrical pairing: Notch wry and demure, Jakob open and effervescent. The latter now helms the development of Scrolls, a card battler whose origins lay in the discussions and debates Notch and he would have over lunch.

“But as King got larger, it started to be a problem for people doing games in their spare time,” Notch says. “They didn’t want people to make anything that could compete. So I left and joined jAlbum . They were totally fine with me doing stuff in my spare time. And then, months later, Minecraft was making a profit.”



Minecraft as it exists today was not quite the initial plan, however.

“It was going to be Dwarf Fortress, basically, but in a Rollercoaster Tycoon type engine. Real 3D but with a fixed isometric camera. I’m a big fan of Dungeon Keeper, so I thought I’d do some kind of ‘possess spell’ where you could actually look at your constructions in first person – it wasn’t meant to be the way to play it. I added that and everything got really blurry because the textures were low-res. I thought: I won’t have this mode because it’s too ugly. And then I saw Infiniminer, which is basically just blocks with huge pixels instead of filled textures. I thought, oh I can just do that – and then it basically turned into the same game.”

Minecraft owes a very clear debt to Infiniminer, a game by Zachtronics, later the developer of SpaceChem, but they aren’t really the same game – certainly not any more. The shared block-building fundamentals were just the first stage of considerable iteration, the goal always being the RPG-infused survival mode.

“My idea was to make a fantasy world interactive, and probably some of the things we did for Wurm carried over,” Notch says. “I tried thinking a lot about instant gratification. When you pick up a block, what does it sound like? If it’s not fun walking around, you’re not going to have a fun game.”

Minecraft went from preliminary dabbling to paid alpha very quickly, a pragmatic approach to online retail that has served Mojang well through its subsequent endeavours.

“I thought, if I don’t charge I’ll never get paid,” Notch explains. “If I wait until the game is done, it’s never going to be done because I won’t have the money to sustain development.”



He found exactly the right place to pitch his half-made game: TIGsource gave him access to a community of developers who were not only willing to offer constructive feedback but whose influence quickly made the game viral. Word spread that Valve were completely obsessed with Minecraft. Little of the game functioned outside the free build mode – which at the time was more a symptom of the ongoing development than an intended feature – but Notch was soon making a lot of money.

“It was very difficult for me to trust the numbers,” he says. “Like: this is just going to stop selling any day. So I stayed with jAlbum, working two days a week for nine months, even though I didn’t really have to because the money I got from Minecraft was way bigger than my salary. I just wanted to play it safe. I grew up in the suburbs of Stockholm, not having much money, and I never really cared because I didn’t have any expensive hobbies. And since I didn’t really use the money , I didn’t really feel like I was rich.”

One increasingly obvious outlet for this wealth was to establish a company, employing extra hands to smooth out Minecraft’s ongoing development, and enabling the long-anticipated collaboration with Jakob.

“And then Valve contacted me,” says Notch. “It was interesting. I got to do programming tests and stuff. They said, ‘Well it’s obvious you’re self-taught. You’re going to have to learn some new habits if you’re going to work in large groups.’ Which I absolutely agree with. But the timing wasn’t right at all. I needed to really give Minecraft a chance.”





“I got a Skype call from Bellevue,” says Jakob. “Notch was like ‘I met with them, they want to hire me, obviously I’m not interested in this so let’s just make it happen. Let’s start this business.’ I was like, OK, I’ll quit my job tomorrow.”

Mojang had already existed in a less formal form – started by Notch in 2009 at the launch of the alpha. But employing people demanded a more legally robust entity.

“We had some extremely stupid ideas about how we were going to make it,” recalls Jakob. “We’d set up this company, and it would borrow money from Notch’s company, maybe, and we’d hire people but they’d also consult for Minecraft. It was just idiotic – because we hadn’t set up a business before.”

They turned to Carl Manneh, jAlbum’s then-CEO, for advice. He advised them to hire him as Mojang’s CEO. Notch and Jakob duly took this advice, and the trio went on to co-found the company. Others soon flocked to their banner. Daniel Kaplan joined to help with business development, Jens ‘Jeb’ Bergensten was hired to develop the backend technology for Scrolls, and prolific pixel artist Markus ‘Junkboy’ Toivonen came aboard to sculpt the game’s visual style.

“When we started we said we’re not going to be more than eight people,” says Jakob. “That obviously didn’t work out. Minecraft started selling three or four times as many copies per day as it had: we needed more people to handle the support.”

There was also the small problem of unfreezing Notch’s money: Paypal had seen fit to limit his account on the grounds of suspicious activity, just as Minecraft sales were spiking, leaving 600,000 Euros stranded.



“Initially we were just putting out fires,” says Notch, “Making sure the server hosting worked, trying to fix the damage from working on a game that large on your own. Some of the good things remain, though. The physics was solid from the start, but that’s because I always tried to make sure that jumping from block to block was fun.”

The plan had been to call the game a full release when the multiplayer survival mode had been finalised, but Notch’s weekly updates never charted a straight path to that goal.

“I kept thinking of new things!” he says. “I had a list of stuff that I would add after the game was done, but the most interesting features of those kept creeping up the list, so it took a long time to finish the full version.”

Even now that the game can be considered a full release, it continues to evolve. Notch, however, has stepped away from the project, leaving it safely in Jeb’s hands.

“I think I’m more interested in doing new development of new games, rather than maintaining a game,” Notch says. “I have this tendency of getting bored or frustrated with things after three to five years. Jeb turned out to be a really good game developer, who was very compatible with how I felt Minecraft should be developed.”

Notch is keen that Jeb has autonomy, and tries not to stick his head into Minecraft’s ongoing development too often. Consequently, its additions continually surprise him: the arrival of the three-headed floating Wither Boss, which shoots exploding skulls; the ever-astounding uses of red-stone, a block type that conducts current, enabling the construction of elaborate circuitry; the modding scene’s many and varied offshoots, adding nuclear weaponry, teleporters and new biomes.



Jeb, for his part, is resigned to the fact that the addition of bats to the game will always headline above his hard work on the game’s underpinning technology.

Meanwhile, Mojang have grown to around 25 people, whose work encompasses the porting of Minecraft to other devices, organising the game’s swelling community and using its renown and accessibility for charitable purposes. Mojang donated all of their royalties from a partnership with Lego to charity, while a collaboration with the UN brings the game to communities in the developing world.

Minecraft is many things to many people – and that’s always been the strength of this most malleable of games. But who does Notch now think it is for? Is it still for that audience of largely adult, largely male developers and like-minded nerds who buoyed it to early success?

“I think we’re still developing for that group,” Notch says. “That’s kind of the target audience, because that’s who we are. But then younger kids like it as well, which either means we’re immature or the kids are more mature than you think.”

And Notch himself – has his fortune changed him? He’s practically insouciant compared to the nervous man I interviewed over the phone back in 2009, at the tipping point of Minecraft’s early success. He no longer needs to prove himself, perhaps – at least, not to me. But ask him about money and suddenly he’s still the same boy from the Stockholm suburbs, the geek done good, coming to terms with what it means to be a wealthy man.

“It’s nice not having to worry about being able to pay the rent,” he says, possibly with a mischievous twinkle. “So that’s a benefit.”

Saturday feels like a strange day to release a game, but when it's a game as wonderfully strange-looking as Jottobots, perhaps that's apt. It's the latest from Kyle Pulver of Snapshot and Offspring Fling fame, and this time he's collaborated with artist Jo. Otto Seibold to create a score-chasing platformer with a strikingly lovely art style. Or rather, he did in back 2009 for the ARTxGAME collective - he's had the game "sitting around" gathering digital dust since then. But now, today, we'll finally be able to play it, with a single dollar being the price of admission.

Admittedly, it isn't available to buy at the time of writing, probably because it's still the middle of the night in the USA. Sitting here in my Hyperbolic Time Chamber, I often forget about trivial things like time zones. While we wait for those lazybones to get themselves out of bed, let's all have a look at the Jottobots trailer, which reminds me of a more actiony Cave Story.

Every week, Richard Cobbett rolls the dice to bring you an obscure slice of gaming history, from lost gems to weapons grade atrocities. This week, remember when terrorists brought the world to its knees? Odd. It was only 17 years ago. How time flies when you're not having fun...

Crime Wave is one of those games where you pick up drugs for bonus points, but can't ever be quite sure they're not going straight into the designer's veins. It's just... wow. Minute to minute, it's impossible to tell if it's a deliberate comedy, or just constantly lucking into being so bad that it's amazing. Maybe it's both. Go get a pillow and place it on your computer desk to avoid breaking your jaw when it inevitably drops, because this week, we're looking at stupidity of criminal proportions.

'Sorry, but I'm a girl in a 90s action game. I think we all know what the rest of tonight holds.'

Oh, Access. It was a strange company, really. On the one hand, it brought the world the Tex Murphy games, and if you were into golf, the famous Links series. On the other (rotten, maggot-infested hand) was absolutely everything else. Armed with endless optimism, and a somewhat loose understanding of other peoples' intellectual property, it desperately wanted to create movie style experiences. It managed to fit video onto floppy disks. It invented RealSound, which gave the PC speaker the ability to play proper audio, when all it had been designed to emit were farting noises at various pitches. And time after time, its games absolutely stank. In hilarious ways. It's amazing we've not looked at more of them here, but don't worry - several are on the hit-list, including the stunning Amazon: Guardians of Eden.



Ah, they don't make 'em like that any more...

As a pure game, Crime Wave isn't very interesting. It's a shameless rip-off of a game called NARC, and doesn't even bother to hide it. You walk from the left of the screen to the right, shooting endless identical criminals on a quest to rid the world of crime. Sometimes you shoot bullets. Sometimes you shoot rockets. I won't be talking much about that, because it's really very dull. Dull, dull, dull.

The wrapping though... the wrapping is a 24 carat crapmine from start to finish. Here, a sample. You play 'super crime fighter' Lucas McCabe. This is 'super crime fighter' Lucas McCabe.

Dear lords of crap, we thank you for this bounty we are about to receive...

With those glasses, this has to be a 90s game. And it is! Somewhat oddly, despite being released in 1990, its setting is the not-exactly-distant 1995, by which point Access suggested that America would have been completely taken over by terrorists and the only cure would be one slightly pudgy guy in shades grabbing the nearest rocket launcher and killing them all personally. But wait. That would be silly enough for most games, but this is Crime Wave. Despite 'super crime fighter' Lucas McCabe never being without his traditionally badass jacket in between-mission briefings, in practice he spends most of the game practicing his Elvis cosplay. If he rescues you, thank him. Thank-im-very-much.

Which presumably means he's collecting these as extra lives.

I wonder how much Coca-Cola would have paid to NOT be in this game.

Could it get any sillier? It can! Due to the way the sprite system works, your best bet for most of the game isn't to stride proudly into danger, but crouch and waddle around. I'm not kidding. The manual itself tells you "Crouching is the most effective way to maneuver (sic) and survive."

In case you're wondering how badass this looks in practice...



But that's Crime Wave! The Adventures of Super Duck Walk Elvis, murdering a million terrorists per missile with a rocket launcher, scooping up an entire Columbia worth of drugs, and the enemies only managing to keep a straight face because as we'll get to, they are even dumber. Not quite as dumb as the button to duck down being , admittedly, but only because that's sodding impossible.

This show sucks. Let's watch My Little Pony instead.

Let's step back though. Why is all this madness happening? Along with the criminal takeover of the entire world, apparently, the President's daughter Brittany Cole has been kidnapped by a terrorist organisation called MOB, and "super crime fighter" Lucas McCabe is the only man with the power-shades to go rescue her. Somewhat oddly, the entire game is spent watching his rampage from their headquarters, on a giant screen that can track him through the city. He mostly returns the favour with psychic powers, or at the very least a convenient tendency to bumble into exactly where they don't want him.

Between missions, the... well, MOBsters I guess, gripe about that quite a lot, while the game shrugs, and occasionally wheels Brittany out for some of the most eye-rolling fanservice ever. Here. An example. This is 'super crime fighter' Lucas McCabe's computer, as he looks up a criminal he needs to beat up. Seems reasonable enough, right? Over the top and very, very 90s, but okay.

Truly, a nefarious sort! His bottom will be smacked with the paddle of justice, and with much alacrity!

See? Nothing to be ashamed of. Here however is his official 'super crime fighter' file on Brittany, the President of the United States' daughter. Repeat. The President of the United States' daughter.


Sorry, ma'am, but we're sworn to protect you, not your clothes. You'll have to leave them behind.

But oh, it gets so much worse. Going by the classic damsel in distress playbook, Brittany's abductors inevitably tie her up. Can you spot the teeny-tiny flaw in their eeeevil bondage plan?

Yep, if she struggles, that might actually hold her for three seconds. Give or take three seconds.

To give MOB some credit, at least they're not unaware of 'super crime fighter' Lucas McCabe carving a bloody swathe through their men - though apparently they are unaware that their boss is secretly Alfred Hitchcock masquerading as the criminal mastermind 'King Pin'. Yep, with a space. Pinhead.

Or is it Fat Groucho Marx? Either way, Daredevil probably isn't shitting a brick right now.

Luckily, as a world-class criminal organisation, MOB has no shortage of specialised agents to do its dirty work. Why, in the first street alone, 'super crime fighter' Lucas McCabe has to super crime fight about five hundred thousand street thugs. When they're obviously not a match for him, MOB HQ simply laughs and moves to Plan B - dispatching the urban jungle's most fearsome predator:

...ninjas? You're... you're actually serious? Plan B is to send in an army of ninjas?

Okay. Look, this might not be as dumb as it looks! In the 90s, ninjas were the ultimate weapon. You wanted something dead, you sent in a ninja. And MOB? They send in ninjas on level 2. If they consider the greatest fighting force ever to be completely overrated by cinema to be a mere grunt, just imagine the badasses they're saving to torture 'super crime fighter' Lucas McCabe on Level 3. Why, they'll...

You're... you're sending in WHO and his pals?

...

I have... I have no words.

...

Excuse me. I... I think I need a moment. Back in a sec, okay?



Dang it, that didn't help at all.

Anyway, where was I? Oh, yes. Over the next few levels, 'super crime fighter' Lucas McCabe never quite matches the sheer shock of seeing Crack Mack, but Crime Wave gives it a good shot. The secret rooms for instance, where MOB keeps its supplies of drugs and money behind easy to dodge laser beams, start out relatively sane. At least, given that this sentence included the words 'laser beams'.

I suppose the idea is that if you get past, you DESERVE to take all the mob's money. Oddly fair of them, but okay!

By the end? I don't know. I think I used to, but then I went insane. It is cuddly here.



Yep, at this point Crime Wave just throws its hands up and declares that even it doesn't care any more. The terrorists originally kidnap Brittany as part of a big plan, but that's pretty much irrelevant throughout and then she's just there for the sake of it. "Super crime fighter" Lucas McCabe tracks her to King Pin's mansion, otherwise known as 'obviously where she is', and fights her captor. This being a 90s side scroller, it should come as no surprise that King Pin has a robot suit. Every villain did in that decade. It came with the spotless white suits, and final cigars they were allowed to smoke.

I'll just embed the final level, because... well, you'll see. Aside from the robot, a personal favourite moment is King Pin defiantly refusing to tell 'super crime fighter' Lucas McCabe where Brittany is, and it promptly taking eight seconds to find her anyway. She's in the basement. Where else would she be? Sorry if that counts as a spoiler. You might want to watch anyway for the topless beach shots that finish the game though, where 'super crime fighter' Lucas McCabe finally gets his hero's reward.



Or indeed, not.

Sigh. Access. I'd say you tried, but that would so obviously be a lie. Until Tex Murphy made it big, anyway, this was pretty much what you got outside of their golf games - pretensions of cinema, wrapped up in shit. Easily its dodgiest moment was stealing its title music. As YouTube now demonstrates so easily, it's a few seconds of Pink Floyd's "One Slip". Of course, this was just 'one slip' for Access. It would never for instance have dreamed of blatantly pinching the Blade Runner poster for the Mean Streets box, any more than a big electronics company would have pinched the theme music from Robocop on the Gameboy to create one of the decade's most infamous ear-worms. Ahem.

Oh, the 90s. Those sweet days when anything seemed possible, if only because nobody was paying attention. How long ago they seem now. How long, and how tasteless. Shudder.

In celebration of its gaming client setting forth from beta, GameFly asks everyone if they would kindly enjoy a free download of 2K's atmospheric FPS. Because, really, when was the last time you issued a swarm of angry bees from your hands into a sealogged half-mutant inside the leaking bulkheads of a dystopian underwater city?

You'll need a (free) GameFly account, and you'll have to nab the game from the store's standard checkout process—don't sweat the credit card requirement; you won't get charged a single cent. You'll also need the GameFly client, so factor that into your consideration to take the plunge into the briny depths.

Head over to BioShock's digital shelf space on GameFly if you're keen on giving the Great Chain a yank once more.

GamesIndustry sat down with members of various studios for a lengthy exploration into the industry's shifting perception of freemium game development, the climbing popularity of free-to-play MMO subscription models, and the shaky balancing act between "money-grabs" and quality free ventures. EA (Battlefield Play4Free), Cryptic Studios (Star Trek Online), Riot Games (League of Legends), and 22 Cans (Curiosity) shared their thoughts on the steady-yet-rocky proliferation of free content.

"I don't think the industry has figured out the right free models for many types of games, so a rush into free-to-play may end up limiting the kinds of content choices that are available to players," Riot Games CEO Brandon Beck said. "That would be a travesty, because we all want to see rich, linear eight-hour experiences continue, as well as many other kinds of games that don't fit into the conventional free-to-play box."

"We may be in for an over-correction; too many companies are going to shift into this model thinking that it's the winning formula and end up getting distracted from what really matters," Beck added.

Cryptic Studios COO Greg Zinkievich—whose MMORPG Star Trek Online beamed back a far stronger population after transitioning to free-to-play—predicted the appearance of many "failures" within a two-year span as the industry shirks the stigmatizing concept of the free-to-play model, saying, "Many who are entering the market right now are doing it as almost a money-grab."

He added quality-oriented MMOs and shooters carrying free systems foment player excitement for the model instead of driving away audiences, claiming subscription fees are "dead": "At the same time is becoming more 'evil' in the social market, what many free-to-play shooters and all the incoming free-to-play MMOs have done is actually get the core gaming audience more excited about free-to-play now than they would have been three or four years ago. It isn't as tarnished as it may seem.

"But subscription is dead. Star Wars: The Old Republic was the biggest possible swing for the fences. There is no longer any argument over whether that can be done. Free-to-play is the way of the future. It is the new world," says Zinkievich.

The rest of GamesIndustry's feature contains equally interesting input from 22 Cans' Peter Molyneux and Spicy Horse's American McGee on free-to-play and other topics, so take a look here.