The story of Minecraft is one of the saddest in gaming history

Notch never followed up his miracle creation. Neither did Tetris’ Alexey Pajitnov. How come only one of them could live with it? This is the dream, right? A game designer and coder, working completely alone and outside of a commercial context, hits on a concept that sets the world alight. It becomes a culture-saturating phenomenon that entertains millions, maybe billions, of people, and expands the popular notions of who games are for and what they can be. Pure inspiration; an untrammelled lightning-bolt of creative genius that inspires the world and makes its creator famous and rich. I think it has only ever happened twice. You can’t even put the achievements of, say, Shigeru Miyamoto in the same bracket. The creator of Mario was working collaboratively, with Takashi Tezuka and many others, as a salaried employee making products, however divinely inspired. The first time it happened was in Russia in the 1980s, when Alexey Pajitnov created Tetris. The second time was in Sweden in the late 2000s, when Markus “Notch” Persson created Minecraft. One or other of these is the best-selling game of all time, depending on whether you aggregate the sales of all of Tetris’ different versions

Mar 21, 2026 → Mar 21, 2026