Markus Persson: Minecraft maker

**Simon Jack** (0:00)
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. It's JavaScript, 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 in to 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.

**Zing Tsjeng** (1:11)
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.

**Simon Jack** (1:18)
Then we judge them. Are they good, bad, or just another billionaire?

**Zing Tsjeng** (1:21)
My name is Zing Tsjeng, and I'm a journalist, author and podcaster.

**Simon Jack** (1:24)
And my name is Simon Jack. I'm the BBC's business editor.

**Zing Tsjeng** (1:27)
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.

**Simon Jack** (1:35)
One of my colleagues said, Oh, this is the guy who owns my eight-year-old's brain.

**Zing Tsjeng** (1:39)
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.

**Simon Jack** (1:48)
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 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.

**Zing Tsjeng** (2:14)
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 Persson, who is currently worth 1.2 billion dollars.

**Simon Jack** (2:36)
So how would this lone coda, if you like, become a billionaire? And how would he handle the pressure once he did? Let's find out. Music Markus Persson was born on the 1st of June 1979 in a small Swedish town called Idsbyn.

**Zing Tsjeng** (2:52)
He loved exploring, so their home was surrounded by these snowy forests and Markus 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.

**Simon Jack** (3:12)
Yeah, his dad was a railway worker, but Markus says he was also a really big nerd. When Markus was 7, his dad bought home a computer, even built his own modem, and Markus used to fake stomach aches to stay off school just so he could play with the computer, and he loved the pirated games his dad brought home.

**Zing Tsjeng** (3:29)
And get this, by the age of 8, Markus was already programming. I mean, that is quite something.

**Simon Jack** (3:34)
Yeah, we've had a few of these annoyingly precocious tech people, haven't we, in this series?

**Zing Tsjeng** (3:38)
Exactly.

**Simon Jack** (3:39)
It's a passport to great opportunity. But he taught himself, he recruited his younger sister Anna as a sort of secretary who would patiently read out lines of code from computer magazines, and Markus 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.

**Zing Tsjeng** (4:01)
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.