Minecraft Development

Markus "Notch" Persson began developing the game as a project.[54] He was inspired to create Minecraft by several other games such as Dwarf Fortress, Dungeon Keeper, and later Infiniminer. At the time, he had visualised an isometric 3D building game that would be a cross between his inspirations and had made some early prototypes.[54] Infiniminer heavily influenced the style of gameplay, including the first-person aspect of the game, the "blocky" visual style and the block-building fundamentals. However, unlike Infiniminer, Persson wanted Minecraft to have RPG elements.[55]

Minecraft was first released to the public on 17 May 2009, as a developmental release on TIGSource forums,[56] later becoming known as the Classic version. Further milestones dubbed as Survival Test, Indev and Infdev were released between September 2009 and February 2010, although the game saw updates in-between. The first major update, dubbed alpha version, was released on 28 June 2010. Although Persson maintained a day job with Jalbum.net at first, he later quit in order to work on Minecraft full-time as sales of the alpha version of the game expanded.[57] Persson continued to update the game with releases distributed to users automatically. These updates included new items, new blocks, new mobs, survival mode, and changes to the game's behaviour (e.g. how water flows).[57]

To back the development of Minecraft, Persson set up a video game company, Mojang, with the money earned from the game.[58][59][60] On 11 December 2010, Persson announced that Minecraft was entering its beta testing phase on 20 December 2010. He further stated that bug fixes and all updates leading up to and including the release would still be free.[61] Over the course of the development, Mojang hired several new employees to work on the project.[62]

Mojang moved the game out of beta and released the full version on 18 November 2011.[63] The game has been continuously updated since the release, with changes ranging from new game content to new server hosts.[64] On 1 December 2011, Jens "Jeb" Bergensten took full creative control over Minecraft, replacing Persson as lead developer.[65] On 28 February 2012, Mojang announced that they had hired the developers of the popular server platform "CraftBukkit"[48] to improve Minecraft 's support of server modifications.[66] This acquisition also included Mojang apparently taking full ownership of the CraftBukkit modification,[67] although the validity of this claim was questioned due to its status as an open-source project with many contributors, licensed under the GNU General Public License and Lesser General Public License.[68] On 15 September 2014, Microsoft announced a $2.5 billion deal to buy Mojang, along with the ownership of the Minecraft intellectual property. The deal was suggested by Persson when he posted a tweet asking a corporation to buy his share of the game after receiving criticism for "trying to do the right thing".[69][70] It was completed on 6 November 2014, and led to Persson becoming one of Forbes ' "World's Billionaires".[71][72][73][74]