Minecraft's Markus Persson then abruptly took $2.5 billion and walked away. A look inside the deal of the year-and the confused, indulgent life of a fallen idol
It’s 7 pm on a Monday in Stockholm, and Markus Persson sits on the terrace of his ninth-storey office, sipping the speedball of alcoholic beverages, a vodka Red Bull. Three hours ago he committed to not drinking today, still in recovery from a 12-drink Thursday bender while nursing an ear infection. Yet here we are, embracing heavy-handed pours of Belvedere while surveying the workers in adjacent high-rises hacking away at their keyboards.
“He looks worried,” says Persson, pointing to a man in a building across the street rubbing his face and staring blankly into a computer screen.
After a few more seconds of looking at the man, Persson seems bothered by the scene and darts inside. For the better part of the last five years the 35-year-old Swede was that guy, a man who constantly stressed about his creation, Minecraft, the bestselling computer game of all time. Even calling it a game is too limiting. Minecraft became, with 100 million downloads and counting, a canvas for human expression. Players start out in an empty virtual space where they use Lego-like blocks and bricks (which they can actually ‘mine’) to build whatever they fancy, with the notable feature that other players can then interact with it. Most players are little kids who build basic houses or villages and then host parties in what they’ve constructed or dodge marauding zombies.
Truly obsessed adults, though, have spent hundreds of hours creating full-scale replicas of the Death Star, the Empire State Building and cities from Game of Thrones. The word ‘Minecraft’ is Googled more often than the Bible, Harry Potter and Justin Bieber. And this single game has grossed more than $700 million in its lifetime, the large majority of which is pure profit.
“It doesn’t compare to other hit games,” says Ian Bogost, a professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology who studies videogames. “It compares to other hit products that are much bigger than games. Minecraft is basically this generation’s Lego or even this generation’s microcomputer.”
In this virtual world, Persson—or rather his internet persona, a loudmouthed fedora-wearing crank named Notch—became a deity-like figure to millions of gamers, establishing and clarifying the rules with Zeus-like authority. But Persson is anything but an opinionated extrovert. Face-to-face he’s polite, plainspoken and private. (He rarely talks with the press.) Over time the demands and expectations of fans looking to Notch to keep the monster hit going turned him into a self-conscious wreck.
So three months ago Persson pushed it all away, completing the sale of Minecraft to Microsoft for $2.5 billion in cash. His 71 percent stake in Mojang, the company behind Minecraft, made him a new, and particularly flush, member of the Forbes World’s Billionaires list. With well over half his life ahead of him, the man who created an entire universe, whose persona was synonymous with it and who received the wrath of his community for abandoning it, must now figure out exactly who he is.
The results so far are unimpressive, as he’s mostly acted like a dog chasing cars. When Persson decided to buy a house in Beverly Hills, he went for a $70 million, 23,000-square-foot megamansion, the most expensive home ever in an enclave known for them. He’s become known for spending upwards of $180,000 a night at Las Vegas nightclubs. He and Mojang co-founder Jakob Porsér have started a company called Rubberbrain in case they think of a new game idea—but right now he can’t focus much on any.
These conversations with Forbes represent Persson’s only interview about the Minecraft deal and his life after. It turns out that the most certain thing this windfall bought him was some heavy soul-searching. The only thing he has learnt for sure: He was right to walk away from Minecraft. In explaining his recent decisions, he quotes Leonardo da Vinci: “Art is never finished, only abandoned.”
This meteoric Minecraft saga starts in the vast Swedish forest somewhere between Stockholm and the Arctic Circle, in the 4,000-person town of Edsbyn. While other children played soccer in the summer and bandy (a variation of ice hockey with a ball) in the winter, the introverted Persson tinkered for hours on end with Legos. His father, a railroad worker, brought home a Commodore 128 home computer when Persson was seven. The eager son coded his first computer program by eight.
While Persson originally wrote the message as a half-joke, the realisation that he could disassociate from Mojang took hold. The man who once publicly pledged that he would not sell out to evil corporations now had his head turned. In the week that followed, Manneh’s phone rang constantly with interest from Microsoft, Electronic Arts, Activision Blizzard and others. Talks with Activision petered out. Persson, cryptically, won’t discuss what happened with EA but says that Mojang ruled out potential buyers “who did gameplay in a way we didn’t like”. Microsoft, however, apparently passed muster.
The motivator for Microsoft, ultimately, was a tax dodge. The software giant was sitting on a $93 billion overseas cash pile that it couldn’t repatriate without paying Uncle Sam his share.
So Manneh dictated the sale terms: Persson and Porsér wanted a clean break and no attachments to the company. Also, given Microsoft’s massive staff consolidation following its purchase of Nokia, no layoffs. (With just 47 employees that wasn’t a material concern for the buyer.)
Microsoft’s point man, Xbox Chief Phil Spencer, dealt solely with Manneh. Persson and Porsér recused themselves from negotiations, though Spencer did spend time, over herb-flavoured Swedish liquor, arguing with them about the direction of the gaming industry. The software giant’s CEO, Satya Nadella, never set foot in Stockholm for what remains the largest acquisition during his tenure. The Microsoft CEO only called Manneh twice to forward the talks.
While lawyers worked around the clock to close, there were few clues of the multibillion-dollar deal afoot. Microsoft kept relatively quiet, though Nadella did say in a July letter to employees that he was investing in gaming, calling it the “single biggest digital-life category, measured in both time and money spent, in a mobile-first world”.
The usually vociferous Persson remained silent, too. He spent his days chasing small ideas for new games and learning programming languages. On September 11 he wrote a blogpost detailing his work with a language known as Dart in rebuilding the earliest version of the classic shooter game Doom, though he peppered the blogpost with clues of the impending sale, using Doom as a metaphor for Mojang. “If I do move on to something new, I’m sure someone with more patience than me to see things through can take over the project,” he wrote, adding, “I can’t spend all my time tied to it.”
On September 15 Microsoft announced it would pay $2.5 billion, in cash, to acquire Mojang. Within hours of the announcement Persson would pen his final blogpost, detailing his departure from the company he created. “It’s not about the money,” he wrote. “It’s about my sanity.”
Looking back, Persson says he was expecting Minecraft’s fans to have a worse reaction to the sale announcement. “The day we announced it, I was going to shut down my Twitter [account] because I wouldn’t be able to deal with it,” he says. “But people were surprisingly okay with it. They read my explanation, and they said, ‘Okay, well I hope you take care of yourself.’”
As for going against his earlier claims that he wouldn’t sell, especially to the company that personifies Big Tech, Persson shrugs and says he can live with his $2.5 billion contradiction. “You have to be responsible for what you said, of course,” he says, “but I don’t really feel a lot of shame for saying something that I’ve changed my mind about.”
Mojang’s staff had a harder time comprehending their former boss’s dramatic shift. While they received bonuses taken from Persson’s part of the deal (Porsér for his part cleared over $300 million aftertax; Manneh, more than $100 million), many felt “disappointed” and “empty” when they heard of the decision, says one employee who asked not to be named. Some still remain cold to Persson today.
“We spoilt them, and their reaction hurts me,” counters Persson. Despite that he’s managed to move on. In November, when the deal finally closed, Persson, Porsér, Manneh and Manneh’s twin brother jetted to Miami and St Barts to celebrate. Persson dubbed their little getaway “the sellout trip”.
(This story appears in the 17 April, 2015 issue of Forbes India. To visit our Archives, click here.)