Markus Persson

Markus Alexej Persson, more commonly known as Notch, is the ex-creator of Minecraft and one of the founders of Mojang AB.

Biography
Persson started programming at the age of seven, using his dad's Commodore 128. He produced his first game (a text-adventure) at the age of eight, with the help of type-in programs. In 2005 he started working as a game developer for King.com, which he left in 2009 to work as a programmer at Jalbum. After Minecraft sales grew he moved from full-time to part-time at Jalbum and then eventually left to focus full-time on Minecraft in June 2010, many of the Mojang employees (including CEO Carl Manneh) are also ex-Jalbum employees. Outside of work he frequently takes part in competitions, including Ludum Dare, LD12 and the Java 4K Game Programming Contest. He lived in Denmark before he moved to Sweden with his parents and went to school there.

Persson had his own part of the Mojang website that could be found at mojang.com/notch. This subdirectory has since been removed.

Persson sold Mojang and all of its assets to Microsoft on September 15, 2014. In a lengthy blog post, Notch states "I love games and I love to program, but I don’t make games with the intention of them becoming huge hits, and I don’t try to change the world." He then goes on to say that "I’ve become a symbol. I don’t want to be a symbol, responsible for something huge that I don’t understand, that I don’t want to work on."

Persson left Mojang on November 5, 2014 along with the other founders. He writes "As soon as this deal is finalized, I will leave Mojang and go back to doing Ludum Dares and small web experiments. If I ever accidentally make something that seems to gain traction, I’ll probably abandon it immediately."

Games and other work
Notch has released much of his work, including, but not limited to:

Games: 2.5d Engines:
 * MEG4kMAN, a Mega Man clone featuring old-school graphics.
 * Left 4k Dead, a zombie shooter game inspired by Left 4 Dead.
 * t4kns, a real time strategy game.
 * Miners4k, a game kinda inspired by Lemmings and Diggers.
 * Hunters4k, a first person shooter.
 * Dungeon4k, a dungeon exploration game.
 * Sonic Racer 4k, a racing game with stolen sprites.
 * Dachon4k, a gravity based shooter.
 * l4krits, a Luxor clone.
 * Blast Passage, an 8-Bit mashup between Bomberman and Gauntlet.
 * Bunny Press, a violent puzzle game made for Ludum Dare 14.
 * Breaking the Tower, a slow-paced strategy game.
 * The Europa Arcology Incident, an RPG-style game Notch made in 48 hours for Ludum Dare 16.
 * Infinite Mario Bros, a Super Mario clone featuring an endlessly-long level.
 * Metagun, a puzzle game Notch made in 48 hours for Ludum Dare 18.
 * Minecraft 4k, Minecraft in less than 4 KB for a Java4K competition.
 * Prelude of the Chambered, an escape game Notch made in 48 hours for Ludum Dare 21.
 * MiniCraft, a top-down Zelda-esque game with elements from Minecraft, made for Ludum Dare 22.
 * Legend of the Chambered
 * First person shooter prototype in flash
 * Flash doom level renderer
 * Dungeon master type game engine in Java (flash version, uses static graphics)

Birthday

 * On June 1, 2011, Notch posted on Twitter that he was 25 years old. 25 is 32, which was his age at the time.
 * Notch programmed the Minecraft splash screen to display "Happy Birthday, Notch!" all day on the 1st of June. This was removed in 1.8.5.