Minecraft: The Story of Mojang

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This film tells the story of one of the most popular video games of all times, Minecraft. The documentary profiles the first year of Mojang, the studio that created the hugely successful computer game Minecraft.

Mojang’s founder, Markus ‘Notch’ Persson, was born in Sweden in 1979. He grew up in a small town in Stockholm. He remembers as a child always longing to create games. In fact, he created his first game at the age of 8. He once told a career counselor at school about his dream and her response was that “that’s not really going to happen.” After leaving his job at King.com to pursue his dream of producing his own games, Markus started looking for inspiration. He finally found it on an indie game development blog called Tigsource. Thanks to this resource, “Notch” ended up playing Infinimine from Zachtronic Industries. This game was an innovative indie that assigned players the task of collecting resources while cutting into a randomly generated landscape. It was a simple game, but Markus realized that it had a lot of potential to become something really great. Shortly after that, Notch began working on a new project. His primary motivation was to create an experience where each individual component offered fun to the player. That way the game would be both accessible and evolving.

Minecraft is a game about breaking and placing blocks. At first, all people did was to build structures to guard against night-time monsters. As the game evolved, though, players began to work together to create ingenious things.

An early version of Minecraft was released in 2009. Nobody could have predicted that by the end of 2011, it would have become a cultural phenomenon.  Many educators and supporters of game-based education have recognized its potential and have embraced Minecraft in classrooms all around the world.  If you’re a Minecraft fan, you have to watch this now.