Markus Persson: Minecraft maker

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It's May 2009 in a small flat in the Swedish capital.

A stocky man sits hunched over his keyboard.

The room is cluttered.

There's empty coffee cups, paper scribbled with ideas, the bad ones crinkled up on the floor.

It's dark outside.

The only light is the blue glow of his computer monitor.

He's furiously typing code, gobbledygook to most, but practically his native language.

On the other screen, a world begins to emerge.

It's rough and blocky, grass, dirt, and even a pixelated figure with blue eyes and a dark beard.

He types more code, hits return, tugs at his beard as he watches his little avatar start digging up blocks on the screen.

Outside, dawn is breaking over Stockholm, casting a weak light through the window.

But now it's ready.

His side project, his baby, in just a couple of weeks, he'd walk into work and hand in his notice.

Time to go independent, to go all in, betting on himself.

Because this stocky coder just wrote, on his own, in one week, the highest-selling video game of all time.

Its name, Minecraft.

Welcome to Good Bad Billionaire from the BBC World Service.

Each episode we pick a billionaire and we find out how they made their money.

Then we judge them.

Are they good, bad, or just another billionaire?

My name is Zing Sing and I'm a journalist, author and podcaster.

And my name is Simon Jack.

I'm the BBC's business editor.

And on this episode, we're profiling a man whom you may know of if you've got a child who is obsessed with this video game.

One of my colleagues said, oh, this is the guy who owns my eight-year-old's brain.

And it is quite the game indeed.

If you've never played Minecraft, it is essentially a world-building game.

So pretty much, you've handed kids the keys to their own world.

It's creative, it frees the imagination, it's very rudimentary, literally building blocks to build a world, almost kind of like a virtual Lego.

And that name comes from literally mine and craft.

You dig the stuff up, you turn it into things.

And it's sold over 300 million copies to date.

More than half of those games are still played every month.

That's the entire population of Canada and Japan together playing Minecraft every single month.

And now Minecraft has also hit Hollywood.

so it is now a major movie starring Jack Black.

And you know, it's incredible because usually these games are produced by huge studios with dozens of staff, tons of funding, big marketing pushes.

But Minecraft really did all start with that one guy, a Swedish programmer named Markus Person, who is currently worth $1.2 billion.

So, how would this lone coder, if you like, become a billionaire?

And how would he handle the pressure once he did?

Let's find out.

Marcus Person was born on the 1st of June 1979 in a small Swedish town called Irdspin.

He loved exploring, so their home was surrounded by these snowy forests.

Marcus used to say he just loved wandering around, or as he put it, just barely not getting lost.

But what he loved even more was Lego.

So for hours, he would sit building these intricate structures and scenes out of those tiny plastic bricks that many of us know and love so well.

Yeah, his dad was a railway worker, but Marcus says was also a a really big nerd.

When Marcus was seven, his dad brought home a computer, even built his own modem.

And Marcus used to fake stomachaches to stay off school just so he could play with the computer.

And he loved the pirated games his dad brought home.

And get this, by the age of eight, Marcus was already programming.

I mean, that is quite something.

Yeah, we've had a few of these annoyingly precocious tech people, haven't we, in this series?

Exactly.

It's a passport to great opportunity.

But he taught himself, he recruited his younger sister Anna as a sort of secretary secretary who would patiently read out lines of code from computer magazines, and Marcus would then type out line by line.

And that's when he figured out that if you didn't type exactly what the magazine said, you could make something totally different.

He said that sense of power was intoxicating.

It's quite interesting, you know, this kind of time of the 80s, because I think there was a real fear then that gaming would hurt children or stunt their development, or, you know, violent video games were going to ruin kids' lives.

Yeah, it's been a very interesting trajectory.

What did Marcus's mum think?

Well, she actually bought into all the scaremongering.

She was worried that Marcus was becoming addicted to gaming.

She would sneak into his room and put up posters of soccer stars to encourage him to play outside.

Apparently, one time she even dragged him to a local soccer club, but he kept missing the ball when he tried to kick it, so the coach gently took her to one side and said, he's not going to be a soccer player.

But by 1988, the family had moved to Stockholm.

Marcus had found a group of like-minded friends at school, nerds like him, if you like, who loved gaming and programming.

They'd set each other coding challenges.

And one time, Marcus coded something which was merely large tech that scrolled across the screen really quickly.

He was proud of it.

He saved it onto a floppy disk.

He put it in his friend's mailbox with a note saying, look what I did.

So Marcus was really starting to find his footing socially.

But things at home were beginning to unravel.

So Marcus's dad had been struggling with depression.

He turned to heavy drinking.

and then amphetamines and then his parents divorced and marcus said it was pretty bad i lost contact with my dad for several years.

My dad went to jail for bad stuff, robberies, break-ins, because he got stuck in substance abuse.

So needless to say, it hit the kids hard.

Okay, tough home life then.

And for a teenage Marcus, programming then became a sort of escape, a refuge where he had total control.

He knew this is what he wanted to do for the rest of his life.

And he said as much to his school counsellor.

They laughed at him.

Instead, they suggested a career in graphic design, arguing that print media, unlike computer games, don't laugh, had a bright future.

So he dropped out of high school, taking an online programming course instead.

The dropout story, it's not an unfamiliar one in this series.

No, we've had so many dropouts, especially in tech, who have just left behind formal education.

Although...

Actually, when I think about it, most of them tend to leave university behind.

They certainly don't drop up for high school that much.

No, that's true.

I can just imagine if my kids said, well, you know, we're dropping out of this, dropping out of that, I would have mounted quite stiff opposition to that.

Maybe my kids aren't going to be billionaires.

Damn.

Understandably, however, there was a problem with dropping out of high school because markers then needed to find work and it was 2001.

The dot-com bubble had just burst.

Yes, that was a massive thing.

The dot-com boom, the dot-com bubble was an extraordinary time when people who just had half an idea could raise tons of money because everyone knew that the internet was going to be massive.

It was going to change the way society, how we all worked and lived and everything.

And everyone wanted to drive a stake into the ground to try and claim a bit bit of it for themselves.

So, you had companies which had, as I say, half an idea or half-baked idea, being able to attract loads of money.

The valuations of these companies, when they first started, started rocketing.

You knew there was a crash coming.

Sure enough, that happened in 2001.

And there was this massive culling of all of these embryonic companies, which meant there were a lot of people who could do stuff with computers milling around with not that much to do in 2001.

And pretty much, as you might expect, Marcus found it quite hard to get a job.

He basically ended up spending days kind of at home, rarely stepping outside.

He was entering these contests to develop games online, but basically ended up telling his mum, Mum, I'm going to live with you for my whole life.

Oh, gosh.

Not exactly what any parent wants to hear.

Nope.

Well, luckily for Marcus's mum, a few years later he managed to land a job in the games industry, first creating some prototypes to test gaming systems, and then at a mobile games company called Midas Player, now known as King, which you might recognize from Candy Crush fame if you like to crush those candies.

Yeah, that incredibly viral game.

It felt like everyone in the world was playing it at one point.

I've got to confess, I sometimes still do.

Understandably, for a company that successful, they wanted people to give their everything to the job.

So it was fast-paced, it was demanding.

Marcus actually enjoyed it.

He was well known for inviting colleagues out for drinks after work or playing computer games during lunch.

So he's becoming a proper tech bro.

And at King, Marcus met Jakob Porsa, a programmer who quickly became a very close friend.

Jakob described Marcus to Rolling Stone magazine as a lot of fun and slightly weird.

He can be super happy or super down as well.

There's normally not a lot of in-between.

Interesting.

And one day at work a new programmer comes in for a job interview and she catches Marcus's eye.

Her name is Ellen Zetterstrand and soon they begin dating.

So things are looking up for our guy Marcus.

He's got a girlfriend, he's got a job, good friends, and he'd finally moved out of his mum's apartment into his own place, which must have been a relief for his mum.

Yes, and relief all round.

But soon the corporate games world began to frustrate him because King had a high volume, quick turnaround approach to game design.

Sometimes they'd spend just one or two months designing a game and Marcus felt the quantity of a quality mindset was a bit stifling.

He actually spent most of his free time after work on a games forum called Tigsource.

Tigsource was an online community for indie developers and fans.

So, you know, people who weren't being hired by those big corporations like King.

They would talk about games, they would build their own games, they play each other's games.

And I mean, the guy really loved gaming.

And honestly, this is really where you start to understand what drives Marcus Person.

The games being shared on Tigsource were raw, they were incredibly creative.

They were nothing like those cookie cutter mobile games that he was being asked to churn out at work.

And those early ones didn't screen commercial success.

No, they didn't.

So they could be, you know, these complex strategy games of simple graphics, passion projects made by hardcore gamers.

So they were very much driven by the personality of the people who were making them.

And Marcus once said, studios make games to make money.

Indie gamers build games just to build games.

So for the love of the craft.

And Marcus had already made some of his own games outside of work as well.

He was really interested in games called MMORPGs.

Decoded, that means massively multiplayer online role-playing games.

It means you play a character in a big virtual world alongside thousands of other players in real time.

And even when you log off, the game world keeps going.

And I suppose World of Warcraft is probably the most famous example of that kind of game.

They're very difficult to program, but Marcus had already managed to build one with just one other friend in his spare time.

Yeah, so he's clearly got a gift.

And also he had a little bit of a bee in his bonnet about his day job.

So it's actually quite rare for game designers to get recognition.

So while we all might know the name of a famous musician or a film director, game designers actually often fade into the background.

And while he was at King, Marcus knew that the company would get the credit for anything he ever created.

And plus they took issue with him building games in his spare time, saying, we felt that we couldn't have someone working for us that at the same time was building his own gaming company.

In fact, they actually asked him to adapt one of his personal projects for King's customers, but the game was a flop.

So Marcus knew if he wanted to be a visionary, he couldn't remain as a cog in a big game machine.

By 2008, he decided to leave King.

So at Marcus's new job, this time it's not in gaming, he insisted he be allowed to work on his own games in his his free time, and his new boss was fully supportive.

So, Marcus had to figure out what kind of game he actually wanted to create.

So, he left this first game behind, but he wanted to stick to the same multiplayer genre.

And remember, Marcus had always loved exploring.

So, you know, as a kid, he'd wander through those forests in his hometown with his friends.

That mix of fear and excitement, the sense of adventure without kind of a clear boundary, you know, that was something he wanted to capture in his next game design.

Yeah, so he was thinking about the gameplay, as they call it.

And he he thought that too many games simply handed players a list of tasks to reach the next level, go and collect this key, go and jump over that.

Marcus had always gravitated, however, towards open-ended games, like, for example, Roller Coaster Tycoon, where you're talking about...

Have you played it?

Yes.

Okay,

there was a sudden burst of enthusiasm there from seeing about Rollercoaster Tyco.

So you have, what do you do?

You literally have to build Rollercoasters or expand it into a theme park.

But there's no kind of mission for you to build a certain type of theme park.

You do what you want.

I like it.

So you can kind of see the root of Minecraft in that.

Got it.

What drew Marcus to these games wasn't the goals, but the freedom they gave players to create and experiment.

And he said it reminded him of playing with Lego as a kid, being able to build anything he wanted out of basic blocks.

Yes, and that sense of kind of creativity became a cornerstone in his vision of this new game, the one that would ultimately change his life.

And it's worth mentioning, you know, that sense of you're able to build and interact with something that other people have built.

That was quite new.

So I think what Minecraft, and we'll talk about this, brought to the table was a user-generated universe.

So you're interacting with things that other people have built and talking to them, and that world continues on after you've logged off.

So it's that sense of freedom, I think, that really draws a lot of people in.

So scrolling through Tigsos, that indie gaming forum, he discovered a game called Infini Miner, which was made by an American designer named Zach Barth.

So it was a sandbox game, which basically means that players can build freely in an open environment without those specific goals or quests or objectives.

And Marcus exclaimed, my God, I realized that that was the game I wanted to do.

So the premise of Infiniminer was simple.

You have to mine minerals.

So Bath originally envisioned it as a competitive team game.

But then he noticed that people were just mining stuff for fun.

So the graphics were basic and those minerals appeared as blocky, mottoed textures.

And Marcus actually later admitted that these blocks directly inspired Minecraft's signature blocky look.

Which, of course, prompts the obvious question.

How much Bath, who made Infinimina, feel that Marcus ripped off his ideas?

And he seems pretty cool about it because he says the act of borrowing ideas is integral to the creative process.

There are games that came before Infinimina and there are games that will come after Minecraft.

That's how it works.

Very generous of spirit, I think.

But then I do think that most games are just variations on things that came before.

I mean, when you think about the first Super Mario Bros.

in 1985, you're controlling a character through a universe and you have to kill the baddies and get coins or whatever it is that you're kind of searching for.

That basic premise has been refined and honed and adapted over dozens and dozens of games since.

So let's go back to where we started.

Marcus is 30 years old.

He's sitting in his apartment in Stockholm, the first light of dawn creeping in and he's still there glued to his computer, furiously coding away and he finishes the first version of his new game, Minecraft.

So the idea was simple but brilliant.

You could do anything.

You can explore this massive world, you can mine the resources it holds and you can build.

And those graphics were blocky on purpose.

So in Minecraft, every single block you see, whether that's trees, dirt, rocks, they can be collected and turned into tools like pickaxes, swords, and torches.

And the gameplay was also simple.

So one button for breaking blocks, another for placing them.

But it's important to say the game wasn't completely open-ended.

So yeah, you could do anything, but you have a limited set of tools and you only have one simple task.

to survive because when night falls monsters like zombies spiders creepy crawlies they come out so essentially you've got to hustle your way around this universe, gather materials and then build a shelter to hunker down before the sun goes down.

And Marcus was pretty pleased with himself.

He couldn't hide his excitement.

He chatted non-stop to his mum about the game.

He even started thinking maybe he should quit his day job and go all in on this project.

His mum smiled, happy to see his passion, but she didn't quite get it.

So she suggested he take it slow.

But Ellen, his gamer girlfriend, was totally on board.

She was the first person to test the game.

Marcus would listen to all her suggestions and reactions as she played and made changes based on her feedback.

And his dad, remember, who was quite troubled, was also supportive.

They were back in touch now.

His dad gave him the feedback that the dark caves were too scary for him, but that was his only critique.

Marcus said, when I decided I wanted to quit my day job and work on my own games, his dad was the only person who supported my decision.

He was proud of me and made sure that I knew it.

And Marcus was also sharing everything he was up to on his blog.

It's called The Word of Notch, and it's still up to date.

So not just his nickname.

It also became his online persona.

It gave Marcus the courage to open up, to talk to his fans directly and to share not just the game but details of his life.

And it's about to make contact with the outside world because on the 17th of May 2009 Marcus uploaded the first playable version of Minecraft to his beloved TIGSource forum.

He was eager to get feedback from the community that he knew and liked.

He wanted to know what they liked, what they didn't, any bugs they noticed, and most importantly, whether it could stand out from the tons of other games which are constantly getting uploaded there.

It'd be his opportunity, the acid test, really, to find out whether there was any real interest.

And guess what?

People loved it.

So right away, they were sharing screenshots of what they'd built.

Everything from bridges and boats to, you know, a giant penis.

As you would with any kind of game, if you give them the tools, they will build it.

You know, these were the early days of let's play videos on YouTube, you know, where people were streaming and posting videos of themselves, playing games and commenting.

So minecraft was launching right as this trend was exploding so it found a ready audience and it wasn't just the youtube community it was everywhere people were building a direct relationship with the game they were sharing their latest creations or memes on forums like 4chan and reddit there was a real buzz about it and the press were noticing too so early reviews said things like the graphics might be blocky but minecraft certainly has a charm about it looking out across the game's stunning landscapes is quite special while the freedom to do anything you want is refreshing.

People are absolutely right when they say it's blocky, it's kind of simple, but at the same time there's something quite charmingly nostalgic about it.

You know, it kind of feels like those games that people played when they were kids back in the 90s and I can understand why the idea of being able to build something like this is so compelling.

But what's also cool about it is you can imagine spending time building in the knowledge that somebody else playing the game would come across it and therefore you could take pride in something thinking that other people are going to see that.

That's kind of cool.

Exactly, especially if you're a kid.

But here was the real test.

Would people pay for it?

Marcus was bold enough to charge people right from the start.

Now that was pretty unusual at that time.

Most online games either had no payments or charged just a dollar for a game like Angry Birds, remember that?

Money usually came from adverts.

Now Marcus had made that early test version that people were raving over for free, but he told everyone the first real completed version of Minecraft would cost $26 when it was finished or only $13 if they paid in advance.

That's quite a big bet, but it was a bet that paid off big time.

Just 24 hours after announcing the price, $150 appeared in his PayPal account.

He couldn't believe it.

And he spent hours watching the sales numbers shoot up.

Day turning into night and back again, his game was actually selling and it wasn't even out properly yet.

And on June the 1st, 2010, his birthday, he gave himself the best gift he could think of.

He quit his job to focus on Minecraft full-time exactly one year after he'd first uploaded the game.

He was going to to make it as an indie game designer.

So a big moment for Marcus.

By July 2010, he was pulling in over $5,000 a day in online sales.

And the craziest part is that he hadn't spent a single cent on marketing, which is, when you think about it, absolutely wild.

Well, if you think about the amount of money that goes into promoting things like PlayStation, Xbox, they get full Hollywood movie release treatment.

Trailers.

Trailers.

They bring to bear all the celebrity star power, the celebrity wattage they can bring.

I mean, I think one of the reasons why people like Minecraft is that there's also an underdog element to it.

As you can see, you know, Marcus quit that big corporation king to go at it alone.

It really is a kind of underdog story.

Yeah.

So by September of 2010, Minecraft had sold 300,000 copies.

So it's worth noting that this is only a year after he posted that trial version of Minecraft on the forum.

And at this point, there's so much money flooding into his PayPal account that they blocked his account, thinking he must be doing something illegal.

He sorted that out.

He'd made $3.8 million, and just like that, he's officially a millionaire.

Yes, all from an unreleased game based on a trial he designed by himself in just a few weeks.

So truly incredible.

But come on, let's take him up to a billion because he's still a long way off.

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OCI costs up to 50% less for computing, 70% less for storage, and 80% less for networking.

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So Marcus had been working on the paid version of Minecraft.

He set the goal of releasing the game in November 2011.

That's more than two years after he started the pre-sale.

But he realized this one man bad realized at this point he needed some help.

So he reached out to his old pal Jakob Porsa, whom he'd worked with at King the Mobile Games Company.

He asked if Jakob would quit his job and join him to help develop Minecraft and his old friend didn't hesitate.

He quit the very next day.

And Marcus officially registered their company name Mojang AB.

Mojang, by the way, is an old Swedish word for gadget or thingamajig, knickknack, dooda.

Okay, but Marcus didn't want to be the boss of his old friend so they set up the company as partners.

Marcus would keep the intellectual property rights to Minecraft, but the company would retain exclusive rights to develop and sell the game.

And they brought in a chief executive to help, Marcus's old supportive boss.

And by December 2010, Mojang had hired a small team.

And they rent this tiny, scruffy office in Stockholm, where they work around the clock on finishing Minecraft.

And in the meantime, sales kept creeping up.

So by January 12, 2011, Minecraft had surpassed a million copies sold.

Just three months later, it doubled to two million.

Well, naturally, with that kind of success, with those kind of growth numbers, the big players started to take notice and some investors came knocking.

Enter Sean Parker.

Fresh off the private jet, dressed in a designer suit, he strolled into Mojang's offices in Stockholm.

Now, you might remember Sean Parker as Justin Timberlake in the social network, but in the real world, he is the Napster guy.

He made his fortune from Facebook and he later invested heavily in companies like Spotify.

And understandably, at first, the Mojang crew are thinking, we don't need an investment.

We've got plenty of money.

Thank you very much.

But Parker had another offer on the table.

He invited the founders to join him at a cool party he was hosting in Soho.

Yeah.

And no, not Stockholm's hipster neighborhood Sodom, which is also known as Soho, but London Soho.

And by the way, his private jet was waiting for them.

So Marcus made a quick call to check with Ellen.

Very sweet.

She said it was fine, darling, please go ahead.

So the Mojang team hops onto the jet and takes off.

Hello, darling.

Yes, I just need to get on a private jet to go to a party in London with a multi-millionaire who has basically revolutionised the music business and is one of the biggest investors in technology in the world.

Is that okay?

Great, okay.

So when they land in London, they headed straight to The Box.

I know you've been there.

I actually have not been to the box.

Have you not?

Okay.

Even I've been to The Box.

Oh, wow.

Well, you can explain what it is.

It's sort of, you know,

it's a fancy members-only kind of nightclub type place.

And that night, CeeLo Green was performing, champagne's flowing, the whole night was a blur of drunken glamour.

Ring any bells.

What?

No.

Well, it wasn't like that when I was there.

There was no CeeLo Green, that's for sure.

Anyway, around half past three in the morning, they stumbled out of the club into their luxury hotel suite, paid for, of course, by Sean Parker.

Then it was back onto the private jet, back to Stockholm, just in time for an interview with a new employee.

Marcus said of the night, I feel like James Bond.

That was from his blog post entitled, Weirdest Night of My Life.

And he marveled at how amazing it was to realize, quote, there are people who actually do this all the time, flying around in private jets, having assistants who have their own assistants.

And that moment would mark the beginning of Marcus's taste for the high life, private jets, parties, all the perks.

How the other half live.

Meanwhile, the buzz around Minecraft just keeps growing.

They strike a deal with Sony Ericsson to develop a mobile version of the game set to launch on their new phone in just three months time.

And when Marcus showed up at the E3 Expo in Los Angeles, big electronics exhibition for the launch, he was mobbed by fans.

He'd started wearing,

interesting touch this, a black fedora, a hat, so he was easy to spot in the crowd.

And this would be the last conference he attended without a bodyguard.

At the Expo, Mojang signed a million-dollar deal with Microsoft to create an Xbox version of Minecraft.

But even without that deal, Mojang was already predicting a $50 million turnover for the year.

Yeah, and amid all this, Marcus found enough time to marry his girlfriend of four years, Ellen.

Finally, the official release day had arrived on November the 18th, 2011, two years after building his own company and landing multi-million dollar deals, Marcus was ready to release the finished version of Minecraft.

So let's take a trip.

In the middle of the Nevada desert, there is a place that never sleeps where jackpots are won under flashing neon lights.

Sin City, I'm talking, of course, about Las Vegas.

And now inside a convention center, thousands of people are stamping their feet and cheering.

This is the first official Minecon, a gaming convention for Minecraft fans, and thousands of fans roam the packed exhibition hall.

Many of them wear big, blocky heads dressed as their favourite characters.

The oldest delegate is 77, and the youngest is just four years old.

So a man climbs onto the stage, wearing a black fedora, smiling nervously, revealing his dimples.

Possibly a little tipsy from the shot of vodka we know he'd taken just before walking on stage.

Bit nervous.

It's almost as if he can't quite believe what's happening.

And the crowd erupts, yelling his name, Notch, and gives him a standing ovation he's blushing quietly pleased feeling awkward hard to tell he's their unlikely hero the man who created this indie game which on that day brought 4 500 people from 24 countries to this convention created a digital world eight times the size of earth played by millions and notch turns to the crowd mic in hand saying it's very overwhelming the reason i started working on minecraft and kept working on it was because there were people playing it the reason we started the company was because there were fans.

The music ramps up.

Marcus, aka Notch, yanks down a big lever to announce the complete version of Minecraft has officially been released.

There's streamers exploding from the ceiling, showering the excited crowd.

And Marcus seems to be enjoying the party, although he's also finding the attention a little bewildering and weird.

So at one point, a fan even hands him her baby to sign.

Sign this baby, okay.

Pretty weird.

But the best part, Marcus's family was there for the launch to witness his meteoric rise as a game developer.

Now, years earlier, Marcus had promised them all a helicopter ride if he ever got rich.

I mean, he can afford to promise a lot more, I think.

But now, he's had his chance to make good on his promise.

In 2011, Mojang brought in over $78 million,

$60 million of which went to Marcus's own company, Notch Development.

And the day after the launch, he ushered his family onto a private helicopter for a flight from Las Vegas over the Grand Canyon.

So, literally, business-wise, metaphorically, flying high.

But then shockingly, after that triumphant moment, he made the shock decision to step down as Minecraft's lead designer.

He'd still be involved, but he said he planned to move on to new projects at Mojang.

He said the last year had been a whirlwind.

He'd created and launched a game, become a multi-millionaire, he got married.

So he took the rest of the year off to rest, play video games, of course, and reset after what he called the weirdest year of my life.

But just a few weeks after stepping down, on December 14th, Marcus received a phone call.

His father father had died by suicide after struggling with substance abuse and alcoholism.

Marcus had actually rented his father a flat in Stockholm, hoping that a change of scenery would help.

And in a later interview with Rolling Stone, he said, It was shocking.

It took me a while to even realize it was real.

So, after all that success, it was a pretty bleak Christmas that year.

His father's death prompted some deep soul-searching.

Marcus worried that his father's mental illness might be hereditary, so he made a point to resist self-isolation, to surround himself with people and with work.

And so he turned his attention to the tricky second act, the notoriously difficult second album.

Exactly, what next?

He started working on an ambitious new game called 10 to the Sea.

Again, a sandbox game like Minecraft where you build stuff out of nothing, but players would control a character aboard a spaceship.

But he really starts feeling the pressure.

He struggles with, I suppose, what you call writer's block.

And now he was no longer this kind of lone guy coding in a basement.

He was famous.

He was notch.

You know, he's a folk hero in that community.

And with fame comes that attention, and that's not always a good thing for the creative process.

He told the New Yorker, there's a conflict between the joy of being able to do whatever I want and the remarkable pressure of a watching world.

I don't know how to switch off.

It's quite interesting because so many of the billionaires that we've talked about don't seem to feel this pressure when it comes to making money because it's not a creative act that they're putting into the world.

But when it's someone like Marcus Person or George Lucas, who was infamously criticized quite heavily for the star wars sequels you kind of get the sense that they do care they do care about making people want to think their product is good when your entire success has rested on a single idea which came from deep within yourself there's not an obvious second act there is there exactly i think it's really hard for creative people who become rich to stay in touch with i think the childhood impulses that led them to become creative in the first place.

And anyway, Marcus's life had completely changed.

He's had more access to more money than he could have ever imagined.

And understandably, he gets a taste for the millionaire lifestyle, private jets, extravagant parties.

He was a big EDM fan, so Marcus would throw that.

Electronic dance music.

Thank you for clarifying.

Thank you for clarifying.

So, you know, arena-level talent would get booked into his players' parties.

You know, people like Avici, Skrillex, he was constantly posting about these parties on Twitter.

One Mojang colleague even said, Marcus loves getting wasted.

He himself said he was just making up for lost time.

He admitted, partying is not the smartest way to spend money, but it's fun.

I like that approach.

We didn't have much fun when we were younger, so I thought, if I get rich, I'm not going to become one of those boring, stuffy, rich people who never spends anything.

But that's not to say that extravagance came naturally to him as a person.

Remember, he is Swedish.

There's a strong cultural value in that country about being modest, about not sticking out.

And Marcus admitted that early on he struggled to spend the cash.

He even said he'd worry that the game would stop selling.

But eventually, he embraced it.

He came up with a rule.

I am allowed to spend half of whatever I make.

That way, I'll never be broke.

Is that good financial advice?

Well, I suppose if you only spend half of everything that's coming in in any one year, you'll never go broke.

If every year you spend half of everything you've got, then you can run out of money pretty quickly.

But it wasn't all about him.

He's very generous.

In 2011, he gave away his £2.2 million Mojang dividend to his employees.

And when Minecraft hit 10 million downloads, he treated the whole staff to a lavish trip to Monaco, three days of luxury cars, yachts and non-stop partying.

So quite the way to celebrate success but it wasn't without cost figuratively speaking.

His lifestyle actually took a toll on their marriage.

A year after getting married Marcus announced that he and Ellen had filed for divorce and the couple had a daughter together.

And a year later Marcus announced he'd shelved his next game.

The pressure to match Minecraft had become too much of him and it zapped the fun out of the project.

He said, I spent a lot of time thinking about if I even wanted to make games anymore.

Once Marcus was at home, wrapped up in blankets, feeling the effects of a nasty cold, and his phone kept pinging, flashing where it lay on the table.

He picked it up and saw a torrent of abuse from his social media feeds.

Notch, his nickname, has always struck me as being a giant tool.

Notch is a fat loser, and that was just the tip of the iceberg.

Now, Marcus was feeling miserable already.

He sank even lower, and he thought to himself, didn't they realize everything he'd done was for them, them, the fans?

So those nasty comments were looming large on his phone, dwarfing any positive ones.

And the reaction was actually all about a change to Minecraft ruse.

Mojang had just added a limit on what players could charge each other for, like improved weapons.

Now, players were angry.

They directed their fury at Marcus personally, even though he hadn't even been involved with the update, and he was fed up.

He started furiously typing a new tweet.

Anyone want to buy my share of Mojang so I can move on with my life?

A few minutes later, Carl Manner, Mojang's chief executive, gets a call.

It was their contact at Microsoft.

They'd seen Marcus' tweet.

Is he serious?

Carl had just read it himself.

I don't know.

Let me find out.

And a few days later, he asked Marcus if he was serious about selling the company, because Microsoft had already made some offers.

Marcus thought about it.

and said yes.

Now, in the past, Marcus had been adamant he would never sell out to big, evil corporations, in his words.

And that independence was actually integral to Minecraft's identity but in the end he admitted people change their minds about things all the time and Microsoft would give him this clean break that he wanted.

Mojang also stressed that none of the employees would be laid off.

Now despite this and the bonuses they got, staffers felt disappointed and empty as they put it when they heard the news.

And Marcus just didn't get it.

So he said, we spoiled them and their reaction hurts me.

Many people were surprised by the sale, but maybe it's completely consistent with who Marcus or Notch has always been.

He said himself, I'm not an entrepreneur.

I'm not a CEO.

I'm a nerdy computer programmer who likes to have opinions on Twitter.

And he added, it's not about the money, it's about my sanity.

Anyway, in September, Mojang was sold to Microsoft.

for $2.5 billion.

Yes, Marcus, Kaomene, and Jakob Posa all left the company as a result.

Marcus gave them equity in the deal, which is kind of big of him.

So shortly after, the founders jetted off to Miami and sent barts to celebrate.

Marcus called it the sell-out trip.

The exact details of how much Marcus got from the deal weren't made public, but it made him a billionaire.

In 2015, he hit the Forbes rich list, his net worth estimated at $1.3 billion.

He is officially a billionaire.

And with that, the infamous indie game developer is semi-retired at the ripe old age of 36.

He's got a new gaming company called Rubber Train, which he co-founded with Jakob Porsa, but they spend more time playing games and scrolling through Twitter and Reddit.

Marcus has even called it daycare for adults.

And at least he's pretty self-aware, saying the gaming world doesn't need more under-delivering visionaries.

I like that.

Yeah, he's got quite a wry sense of humour, you sense.

Not long after the Microsoft sale, in fact, Marcus made his flashiest purchase yet.

He spent $70 million on a mansion in Beverly Hills.

And get this, he even outbit Jay-Z, one of our billionaires, and Beyoncé for it.

But don't worry, they weren't too upset about it.

Later on, they attended parties that Marcus hosted alongside other guests like Selena Gomez, also a newly minted billionaire, and pro skater Tony Hawke.

I'm just struggling to imagine Marcus' person

when he was a kid in his Stockholm flat saying, oh, I'll just get Jay-Z and Beyoncé to come over for a bit of a bash.

I mean, they don't have much in common apart from what?

Several millionaires.

I can't think.

Well, at least that.

He's a billionaire.

Jay-Z's a billionaire.

So they've got that in common.

You're birds of a feather, as they say.

And also, $70 million on a house gets you quite a lot of things yes according to the property listing it's an overwhelming sensory experience among the essentials towers of mm vodka and tequila bars a movie theatre and a car elevator that takes your guests cars to underground storage you know it's not what i would want saying can't buy you happiness yeah

i always never know about this wow i mean in the summer of 2015 marcus started tweeting about how lonely he was he wrote the problem with getting everything is you run out of reasons to keep trying, and human interaction becomes impossible due to imbalance.

Hanging out in Ibiza with a bunch of friends and partying with famous people, able to do whatever I want, and I've never felt more isolated.

Poor Marcus.

Get out the world's tiniest philosophy.

At least he showed some self-awareness, and I've liked this about him throughout this story.

He apologised the next day, tweeting, to people out there with real problems, I'm sorry, the whining of a newly wealthy programmer gets more attention than yours.

Stay strong.

But Marcus was about to get get into serious trouble.

Now, in 2017, he was condemned for tweeting racist and homophobic comments.

These were really nasty, aggressive comments, like anyone who opposed heterosexual Pride Day should be shot, in his words.

And then in 2019, he caused even more upset with transphobic comments and an endorsement of QAnon, the conspiracy theory that ran rampant in the United States.

Well, by this point, Microsoft had had enough.

They scrubbed all references to Marcus's alter ego notch from the game and didn't include him him in any of the Minecraft 10-year anniversary celebrations.

So what's the semi-retired gamer up to now?

Not much, it seems.

Since the game was sold to Microsoft, Marcus has posted about starting various new projects plus a new company, BitShift Entertainment, but there has been no actual release of any new games.

Marcus still seems excited about the Minecraft film, though.

He even shared on X for a movie about a game with literally zero plot.

It looks surprisingly fun.

And Marcus earlier this year actually hinted he might make Minecraft 2, which caused, as you can imagine, quite a lot of excitement among his followers.

But of course, since he sold the rights to Microsoft, he can't actually use the name.

So it would be more of a spiritual successor, kind of nudge, nudge, wink, wink.

We all know what this is.

So watch this space, this block.

And now we have to cast our eye over Marcus' person

and judge him.

So let us start with wealth.

Well, Marcus's wealth hasn't actually changed that much since he became a billionaire, right?

So he's definitely not in the billionaire big leagues for me.

He showed no ambition to go beyond.

You compare that to the Bezos of this world and the Zuckerbergs of this world.

You know,

a billion was literally in the foothills of their ambition.

I will say that in the plus column for his wealth, he definitely likes to spend money.

Aside from that $70 million house in Beverly Hills that Beyoncé and Jay-Z lost out to, he owns the most expensive apartment in Stockholm, which cost $2.6 million.

That's remarkable in itself.

He loves renting private jets and he once bought, I like this one, a rare Aphex Twin vinyl record for $46,000.

It was called Caustic Window.

Are you an Aphex Twin fan?

I know one or two songs, but I have to say the music is very caustic, too caustic for me.

Yeah.

Anyway, Marcus says he grew up in a relatively poor family and commented frequently how overwhelmed he was by his fortune as he got richer.

He did seem to like, I can't believe how much money I've got.

Yeah, I actually feel like Marcus comes off as more of a regular person around this wealth than a lot of the billionaires we've exactly.

You take some of the billionaires and you take away their money and they would be quite a different person, I think.

You take Marcus person with or without the money, I think he's kind of the same guy.

It doesn't seem to have changed him that much.

No.

So, okay, on wealth, we've got to give him a score between one to ten.

Obviously, in terms of actual numbers, he's only just entry-level in billionaire status.

He's also,

it feels like he kind of like he's one of those bumpkin billionaires who basically finds it hard to spend the money.

He's like, I'm throwing as many parties as I can.

I'm getting as many private jets as I can.

I'm having as many, you know, and yet doesn't seem to be able to sort of fritter it away.

So he's trying, but it doesn't come naturally to him.

So I'm going to give him a very low, I'm going to give him a two for wealth.

Well, I think I'm going to go slightly higher and give him a four.

There's something about buying a rare Apex twin vinyl that I think just edges him up for me.

Okay.

Two for me, four for you.

Villainy.

What has he done on the way to get to that?

Who's he done over?

How ruthless has he been?

I mean, he gave his old partners equity when he sold out, right?

Which didn't have to.

Yeah.

And he gave dividends, 2.2 million in dividends to his employees.

And we know plenty of billionaires who kept dividends for themselves.

Yeah.

But he hasn't officially apologised for those offensive tweets.

He deleted his Twitter account in 2020, but it's back up and running so you know who knows maybe he had some kind of you know tirade when he was you know by his own admission partying too hard but those things don't come out of nowhere

bearing in mind we are judging him in the pantheon of our billionaires which also includes literal arms dealers and drug dealers and drug dealers yeah I think that he's you know

offensive tweets aside he's pretty harmless.

Yeah, I would give him a pretty low three out of ten, two out of ten.

I'm going to go two as well.

We've already touched on it, but giving back philanthropy, he's talked about it before.

Yes, he actually said, I think the right way to use money like this is to set a decent portion aside to make sure my family's comfortable, spend some on living out your dreams, and then try to put the rest towards making society a better place.

For me, this includes charities that help children, charities that help promote freedoms I think are vital in the coming dozens of years, such as EFF, which, by the way, is Electronic Frontier Foundation.

It's a San Francisco-based non-profit that protects digital privacy, free speech, and innovation.

But having said that, we don't really have the numbers for how much he's donated to these causes.

Yeah, protecting digital free speech can be a double-edged sword, as we've found.

As we've found in recent years.

As we found in recent years, weeks and months.

Giving back, I'm going to give him, I mean, I just don't know.

So I'm going to either give him nothing at all because I just NA, or I'll give him two.

Yeah, I think, to be honest, even two might be generous, given we don't have any figures at all.

I'm just going to give him a one to the C.

Fine.

All right.

One and two.

Power.

He's not your typical billionaire trying to wield power, curry, favour with politicians, that kind of stuff.

No, he really isn't.

Even though, arguably, he could do a lot.

I mean, Minecraft is essentially its own social platform in addition to being a gaming platform.

That's true.

There is some power for good in this.

Quite a lot of parents of autistic children have talked about how Minecraft, the game, is helpful to help communicate with autistic children.

They can find methods of self-expression in that.

I can believe that.

Yeah, Guardian journalist Keith Stewart said that Minecraft actually helped his relationship with his autistic son.

He said, Minecraft seemed to have given him both a vocabulary and the confidence to use it.

It created a safe and creative space for a lot of children who may struggle to find those spaces elsewhere.

Yeah, and I think it is pretty widely used in schools as well.

So lots of positive applications.

In terms of power, I mean, he's maybe within the video gaming, he's more of a folk hero than a power player, isn't he?

Yeah, he had a really great story in the sense that he started out, he's thumbed his nose at the big corporate gaming world like King, went off and did his own thing, and then he kind of almost ruined it for himself by selling out to Microsoft.

Again, you know, I don't think he'd want to have too much power, so he will not be upset if I give him a two.

Yeah, I would give him a two out of ten as well.

Okay.

I think he's perfectly happy just being the gaming guy.

Yeah.

So is he good, bad, or just another billionaire?

Oh, I feel like I'm edging towards him being a good billionaire.

Well, I do have a problem with those tweets that he posted.

I do think they are harmful.

But, you know, we talked earlier about how game developers like Marcus Person aren't as famous as musicians or film directors.

You know, you could be a Minecraft addict for years and never know the name Marcus Person.

And maybe because of that, their work isn't associated with them as much as it is with films and music and books are associated with the people who created those works of art.

So for me, the negative things that Marcus Person has done in a dark corner of the internet, they haven't really sullied this positive thing that he built with Minecraft.

When you think about it, how many games have encouraged that level of creativity in children, particularly young children?

You know, I think it's quite special.

I think if we were looking at the person who invented Lego and we would ask ourselves, was he a force for good in the world?

And I do think Minecraft is actually just the digital version of Lego.

That's a very, very powerful argument.

Once again, you have dragged me into your camp because you're right, because if it is the digital version of Lego, and if I think about my own experiences as a child with Lego and watching other children with Lego, and this is the modern version of that, you'd be hard-pressed to say that's anything other than good.

Marcus Persson, you're officially a good billionaire.

Well done, Marcus.

So, who do we have on the next episode?

We have wrestling mastermind, Mr.

Vince McMahon.

That's right, the former owner of WWE World Wrestling Entertainment.

It's come a long way since I was watching Big Daddy and Giant Haystacks in the 1980s.

It's now a multi-billion dollar enterprise with its heroes and villains and its big stories and its spandex of course.

That's Vince McMahon next on Good Bad Billionaire.

Good Bad Billionaire is a BBC World Service podcast.

It's produced by Louise Morris and Mark Ward with additional production by Tamson Curry and Sarah Joyner.

Paul Smith is the editor and it's a BBC Studios audio production.

For the BBC World Service, the senior podcast producer is Kat Collins and the commissioning editor is John John Mineau.

And if you enjoyed it, do tell a friend.

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