How Minecraft started: 40 copies in its first weekend

How did Minecraft start?

In May 2009, Swedish developer Markus Persson, known as Notch, wrote alone, over the course of a weekend, a basic version of a block game and mentioned it on a forum for independent game makers, TIGSource¹. The first public version came out on May 17, 2009⁴.

A month later, he began charging 10 euros to download the game, which was still far from finished. In the first weekend of sales, it sold 40 copies, according to Wired magazine¹.

Forty copies is very little next to the size the game reached later. But the game was built on purpose to grow little by little: every Friday Persson released an update with new things, and with each one sales went up¹.

Who created Minecraft, and did he know how to code?

Yes, very well. Persson said his father bought a computer when he was 7, and that he wrote his first program at 8: an adventure game made only of text².

Before Minecraft, he worked more than four years at King, a web games company². There, according to Wired, he made a new game every two months and says he made 25 to 30 in total¹. When he started Minecraft, he had left King and joined a photo company, jAlbum⁴.

That's why this is a "started small" story, and not a "started knowing nothing" one. The weekend was short for the first version because the person at the keyboard already had years of practice (our reading).

Where did the idea come from?

From other games. Persson wrote, in October 2009, that he was making a base-building game inspired by Dwarf Fortress when he found Infiniminer, a small game about digging and building with blocks. In his words, he realized that was the game he wanted to make³.

He found Infiniminer fun, but lacking variety, and pictured the same style in a fantasy world. To test it, he reused art and parts of the code from the older project³. In other words, the first version combined an idea he saw in another game with pieces he already had stored away.

How do you play Minecraft?

In Minecraft, the whole world is made of blocks, and the player breaks blocks and places them somewhere else to build whatever they want⁴. The game has no required goal: each person chooses how to play⁴.

There are two main ways to play⁴:

• Survival: you gather materials to make tools, and at night monsters appear, so you have to build a shelter.
• Creative: you have almost every block at will and just build, without getting hurt.

Why is Minecraft so addictive?

Because nobody tells you what to do, and so people had to talk to each other. The game had no instructions: you could figure out on your own how to make a bed, for example, but it was easier to ask someone who already knew, and so the game spread by word of mouth¹.

Persson himself linked sales to this. In March 2010, he said sales moved together with the pace of the work: the more he worked on the game and talked about new features, the more it sold².

How long did it take, and with how many people?

The first version took a weekend and was made by one person¹. The finished game took two and a half more years: the final version came out on November 18, 2011⁴.

Along the way, the work stopped being one person's. In March 2010, nine months after sales began, Persson had sold 6,400 copies, an average of 24 a day, and still worked two days a week at a job, in his words "for security"². In the summer of 2010, he founded Mojang with two partners, and the game got a team¹. In December 2011, he handed the game's lead to another programmer, Jens Bergensten⁴.

By the numbers

What does the Minecraft story show, and what doesn't it?

It shows that a huge game can start with a very small version, put in front of people early, and improved with the people already playing. The 40 copies were the start of a path, not the result.

The other side

Minecraft doesn't prove it's quick or easy. The weekend applies only to the first version; the finished game took more than two years, and the author had programmed since childhood and had already made dozens of games. The idea came from another game. And it's a survivor: for every game like this, there are thousands that started the same way and almost nobody played. Nobody can promise a game will sell, not even 40 copies.

And what does AI do in this part today?

This part isn't about Minecraft, which was made without AI. It's about the work.

What made the first version fit into a weekend was years of practice writing code. Today, that part can be handled by AI: you describe what you want and it writes the code, which got the name vibe coding. That doesn't make the work easy or quick: testing, fixing and deciding are still up to you.

What AI doesn't decide is what Persson decided: what the smallest playable version is, and what to change by listening to the people who play (our reading). If you want to understand this split better, see what AI does and what stays with you, how long the first game takes and other famous games that started small.