The Start
Before coming up with Minecraft, Markus "Notch" Persson was a game developer with King through March 2009, during which he learned a number of different programming languages. He would prototype his own games during his off-hours at home, often based on inspiration he found from other games. One of these personal projects was called "RubyDung", a base-building game inspired by Dwarf Fortress, but as an isometric three dimensional game like RollerCoaster Tycoon. He had already made a 3D texture mapper for another zombie game prototype he had started to try to emulate the style of Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars. Among the features in "RubyDung" he explored was a first-person view similar to Dungeon Keeper but at the time, felt the graphics were too pixelated and omitted this mode.
The Release
Infiniminer, a block-based open-ended mining game first released in April 2009, sparked Persson's inspiration for how to take "RubyDung" forward. Infiniminer heavily influenced the visual style of gameplay, including bringing back the first-person mode, the "blocky" visual style and the block-building fundamentals. The original build of Minecraft was released on 17 May 2009 on TIGSource forums. As years passed, Persson regularly released test builds which included more features, such as tools, mobs, and even entirely separate dimensions. In 2011, partially due to the rising popularity of the game, Persson decided to release a full 1.0 version, which later became the "Adventure Update". It was released on 18 November 2011. Soon afterward, Persson quit development on the game and gave the project lead to Jens "Jeb" Bergensten.
New Ownership
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 enforcing terms in the game's end-user license agreement (EULA). According to Persson, Mojang CEO Carl Manneh received a call from a Microsoft executive shortly after the tweet, asking if Persson was serious about a deal. Mojang was also approached by other companies including Activision Blizzard and Electronic Arts. The deal with Microsoft was arbitrated on 6 November 2014 and led to Persson becoming one of Forbes' "World's Billionaires".
