Markus Persson

Markus Alexej Persson (, ; born 1 June 1979), also known as "Notch", is a Swedish video game programmer and designer.

Markus Alexej Persson was born in Stockholm, Sweden, to a Finnish mother Ritva and a Swedish father Birger on 1 June 1979.

He has a sister.

He grew up in Edsbyn until age 7, before his family moved back to Stockholm.

In Edsbyn, Persson's father worked for the railroad and his mother was a nurse.

He spent much time outdoors in Edsbyn, exploring the woods with his friends.

When Persson was around age seven, his parents divorced, and he and his sister lived with their mother.

His father moved to a cabin in the countryside.

Persson said in an interview that they experienced food insecurity around once a month.

Persson lost contact with his father for several years after the divorce.

According to Persson, his father suffered from depression, bipolar disorder, alcoholism, and medication abuse, and went to jail for robberies.

While his father had somewhat recovered during Persson's early life, his father relapsed, contributing to the divorce.

His sister also experimented with drugs and ran away from home.

He had gained interest in video games at an early age.

His father was "a really big nerd", who built his own modem and taught Persson to use the family's Commodore 128.

On it, Persson played bootleg games and loaded in various type-in programs from computer magazines with the help of his sister.

The first game he purchased with his own money was The Bard's Tale.

He began programming on his father's Commodore 128 home computer at the age of seven.

He produced his first game at the age of eight, a text-based adventure game.

By 1994, Persson knew he wanted to become a video game developer, but his teachers advised him to study graphic design, which he did from ages 15 to 18.

Persson, although introverted, was well-liked by his peers, but after entering secondary school was a "loner" and reportedly only had one friend.

He spent most of his spare time with games and programming at home.

He managed to reverse engineer the Doom engine, which he continued to take great pride in.

He never finished high school, but was reportedly a good student.

Persson started his career working as a web designer.

He later found employment at Game Federation, where he met Rolf Jansson.

The pair worked in their spare time to build the 2006 video game ''Wurm Online.

'' The game was released through a new entity, "Mojang Specifications AB".

Persson left the project in late 2007.

He is best known for creating the sandbox video game Minecraft, which has since become the best-selling video game in history; and for founding the video game development company Mojang Studios in 2009.

Persson began developing video games at an early age, making games both professionally and for pleasure for much of his life.

He achieved critical success upon the publishing of an early version of Minecraft in 2009.

Prior to the game's official retail release in 2011, it had sold over ten million copies.

After this point, Persson stood down as lead designer and transferred creative authority to Jens Bergensten.

In September 2014, Persson announced on his personal website that he had concluded he "[didn't have the connection to his fans he thought he had]", that he had "become a symbol", and that he did not wish to be responsible for Mojang's increasingly large operation.

Persson left Mojang in November of that year, selling his company to Microsoft for a reported US$2.5 billion.

As the majority shareholder, the acquisition made Persson a billionaire.

In 2015, he co-founded a separate game studio called Rubberbrain.

Since 2016, public criticism of several of Persson's Twitter posts in which he wrote of his beliefs that transgender women are not women, that the QAnon conspiracy theory is "legit", and that those critical of a heterosexual pride day "deserve to be shot", has arisen.

In 2019, Persson's tweets were censured by Microsoft, who subsequently removed mentions of his name from Minecraft (excluding one instance in the game's end credits) and did not invite him to the game's tenth anniversary celebration.