A game with retro graphics and no way to ‘win’ has become a multibillion-dollar empire, now with its own movie starring Jack Black – and evidence that it has been used as a far-right recruiting tool. Simon Usborne digs into how Minecraft struck gold.
It’s quite hard to get an eight-year-old boy to tell you why he is so obsessed with Minecraft while he’s sitting at a desk under a bunk bed furiously tapping away at the game on a tablet. His six-year-old brother, Fife, also plays, but Innis, aged eight, is “off-the-chart bonkers”, says their mother, Hester.
I cast my eye around Innis’s room at the family’s home in Bromley, southeast London. Rex the hamster shuffles about in a cage. There’s a shelf of children’s books and a stack of homework. But mainly there is Minecraft stuff: posters, a water bottle, pencil cases, sticker books, T-shirts and Minecraft Lego kits in various stages of completion.
Innis first caught sight of the bestselling computer game in history on YouTube, which swells with Minecraft content. By May 2024 videos related to the franchise had gained 1.5 trillion views. Whole genres have emerged: tutorials, parodies and increasingly rich creators talking animatedly while streaming their journeys through the game’s seemingly infinite virtual realms.
YouTubers such as Joseph Mark Garrett, better known as Stampylonghead, and Dan Middleton (aka DanTDM) have built one-man media empires on Minecraft with 28 billion views between them. “It was either PrestonPlayz or Craftee,” Innis says, referring to the two YouTubers who inspired him. “I watched them play it and it just looked like the best thing in the world.”
In one recent video by PrestonPlayz (aka Preston Arsement, 30, from Texas), his face appears on screen as he commentates on his own search for secret rooms in a blocky virtual mansion. In all these videos the gamers speak with the energy of a Blue Peter presenter after bingeing on Prime energy drinks.
The YouTubers’ success, and that of Minecraft, is largely a result of the game’s unlimited adaptability. It is what is known in the US as a “sandbox” game: like a sandpit, it invites players to design and build their own worlds. So, for more than 15 years, whole armies of gamers, many of them children, have become immersed in this world of blocks. On their tablets and consoles they create and explore fantastical structures while mining, foraging and trading materials, tools and weapons. They make shelters to defend against hostile “mobs” – short for mobile entities – such as skeletons and zombies. They can play alone in single-player mode or with others online.
The point of the game is almost that there is no point; while players can claim ultimate victory by defeating the Ender Dragon, Minecraft’s most fearsome final boss, there is no requirement to “complete” the game. It is anything a player wants it to be. “It’s a game about nothing, but in the midst of this nothingness, everything is possible,” read one review of the first official release, in 2011, in Gamereactor magazine.
Minecraft fans are about to be even more spoilt for content. After more than a decade of development, a live-action film, called A Minecraft Movie, is due to be released in the UK next month, in time for the Easter holidays*. It stars Jason Momoa and Jack Black and features four misfits who navigate a “bizarre, cubic wonderland”.
A Netflix TV adaptation is also in the works, while an immersive Minecraft Experience will open in Canada Water in southeast London at the same time as the film. In the next two years the first of several Minecraft theme parks is due to open in the UK and the US as part of an £85 million (NZ$195m) licensing deal with Merlin Entertainments, the British firm behind Alton Towers and Legoland.
Meanwhile the downloads keep coming; the game had sold more than 300 million copies by the end of 2023, for as little as £6.99 each for the iPad version. As many as 60 million people played the game on the busiest day in the past month, according to Active Player, a site that collects gaming statistics. Minecraft has also spawned spin-offs such as Minecraft Education, a version for use in schools that includes lessons and challenges.
Ryan Cooper, head of Minecraft at its parent company, Microsoft, says the game’s appeal extends to Antarctica and the Vatican. He declines to reveal who might be playing in the papal city. “I can’t say for sure, but, er, good people,” he says from Microsoft’s headquarters in Seattle. “But we’re just getting started. As much as we create, our fans just want more Minecraft.”
The game now has a generational momentum; the young adult gamers who propelled it from obscurity to a global hit 15 years ago are witnessing their children embarking on virtual journeys of their own. “It has got to a size now where it feels as though it’s too big to fail, and will just continue to propel itself forwards for another 15 years,” says Lauren Morton, a video games journalist at PC Gamer and Minecraft fan.
Several young Minecraft players I speak to say they have become so absorbed that even their dreams take place in its blocky world. “I had one where it was Minecraft but everything was dirt, just this wasteland,” Innis says. “And then this big dirt man came and killed me.”
My teenage gaming days are long behind me (mostly CD-Rom versions of Doom or Actua Soccer). With its retro pixelated graphics and tacky merch, Minecraft has always looked from afar like an unlikely hit. I had little idea of its origins – from the mind of a gaming geek, now billionaire, in Sweden via a Dundee start-up – or just what an enduring phenomenon it had become. So how did a few pixelated cubes on a coder’s screen become the building blocks of a multibillion-dollar international empire?
Origins of a blockbuster
Minecraft emerged in 2009 as a side project for Markus Persson, a 29-year-old Swedish game developer from a working-class family in Stockholm. Better known online as “Notch”, Persson was captivated by exploratory first-person titles such as Grand Theft Auto, but in particular Infiniminer, a game that involved moveable blocks. After working on a number of Minecraft prototypes with names such as Cave Game and RubyDung, he released a playable version on a forum for game developers in May 2009 and gained a small following.
A year later Persson had quit his day job and founded Mojang Studios with his friend Jakob Porser, devoting their time to the game. Persson kept making improvements, including the ability to save projects and collaborate online, while players started to build whole towns and mine subterranean mazes. He was also radically open in the development of the game, which was initially available only as a download for PCs, inviting players to recommend improvements. Paul Eres, an American developer, suggested the name Minecraft.
Early interest was almost cultish, but not everyone thought it could be a hit. “It felt like a piece of 3D art software where you were supposed to Lego together a blocky-looking castle,” said Lewis Brindley, co-founder of the British gaming YouTube channel the Yogscast, in The World of Minecraft, an official history of the game published last year. “I thought it was boring.”
Further tweaks included the introduction of a survival mode, in which players could still explore and build, but could also sustain damage by falling from a height or by being attacked by hostile creatures – the mobs. Enough damage causes death, albeit followed by immediate resurrection. One of the mobs, the green “creeper”, which has become the face of the game, started as a failed attempt by Persson to code a pig.
As new tools and materials became available, early adopters of the game built ever more elaborate structures, including replicas of cities from Game of Thrones and the Star Wars Death Star.
Persson began selling a beta version in June 2009 via PayPal. It exploded on YouTube and, a year after its official release in November 2011, he was able to pay himself about £57 million.
Still limited to PCs at this stage, Minecraft’s growth was about to be supercharged by two old schoolmates from Dundee. Chris van der Kuyl and Paddy Burns had already achieved modest success at 4J Studios, the Scottish games company they founded in 2005, when they were invited for a meeting with Persson in Stockholm.
Van der Kuyl, who is now 55, had been an admirer of early Minecraft. “It was about reclaiming gameplay,” he says. “Rather than it all being, like, ‘What actors do we have in the game?’ and ‘How many millions can we spend on motion capture to make this like a movie?‘, it was more this huge interactive toy.” Persson asked the pair if they could recreate Minecraft for the hugely popular Xbox 360 games console.
The best business decision Van der Kuyl says he ever made was to charge Mojang nothing for 4J Studios’ work, instead demanding a small royalty on every copy. He says Mojang was predicting sales of 700,000 when 4J’s Xbox version of Minecraft came out in May 2012. It sold a million copies in the first five days.
4J Studios would also get a cut of sales of downloadable third-party add-ons including “texture packs”, which change the aesthetic of the game, “skin packs”, which change the appearance of characters, and “mods”, short for modifications, which tweak the gameplay itself – for example, adding cars. These widgets, which Mojang made available for “pocket money prices”, would later be sold via the Minecraft Marketplace when it launched in 2017. Today they cost between £2.50 and £7.50 each.
“We went on to sell tens of millions of copies of the game and hundreds of millions of add-ons,” says Van der Kuyl, who is now personally worth £150 million.
Last year 4J Studios announced it was working with the YouTuber Stampylonghead on its own game inspired by Minecraft called Reforj. Van der Kuyl says the game has little chance of matching Minecraft’s success, but that he and Burns had long dreamt of developing their own sandbox title.
The boys from Dundee aren’t the only people to get Minecraft-rich. Dan Middleton, 33, was a student and Tesco shelf-stacker in Northampton when he first played the game soon after its official release. He had modest ambitions when he started his DanTDM (Dan the Diamond Miner) YouTube channel in July 2012. In his first video he demonstrated a Pokémon mod that teleported the Japanese characters into the Minecraft universe.
Middleton told himself he would quit his day job if the money he made from YouTube advertising topped his pay at Tesco. It didn’t take long. “I got a million subscribers in under a year,” he says. Thirteen years later his 3700 videos have been viewed more than 20 billion times. He has filled arenas with live events, published books and now presents Next Level, a show on Classic FM for video game music. He is worth an estimated £40 million. “I still pinch myself most days,” he says.
Minecraft was initially popular with young adults but quite quickly children fell for its Legoish charms. Middleton says he gets recognised every time he leaves the house, either by kids who play the game now or teenagers who used to. “They say things like, ‘You made my childhood.’ ”
A wholesome screen activity?
Minecraft’s nine-plus age rating on the iPad is clearly taken only as guidance. At another family home in southeast London, Isabella Sworder-Newman, seven, is navigating a vast Italianate beachfront villa – a sort of Mar-a-Lego doll’s house – in a blur of thumb taps. She has been playing the game for two years and says it does feel a bit like Lego. “Except that now Daddy doesn’t have to tidy it all up,” says Matt Newman, her father.
Isabella then switches to a house she built herself – a glass-walled bungalow improbably balanced on a slender brick column. Its height is supposed to protect her from the mobs but they’ve found a way up and she’s soon having to fend off creepers and zombies. “Oh biscuits! Oh biscuits!” she says, using the curse favoured by the dad in the cartoon Bluey.
Thanks to its blocky graphics, Minecraft is about as gore-free as video game killing gets. Matt shares a widely held view among parents that the game is one of the more wholesome things children can get up to on screens. “It feels totally kid-friendly, although we’ve not let her go online yet,” he says. “But Daddy, I want to play online with my cousin!” Isabella says, her eyes still glued to the game.
Allowing children to play online in multiplayer mode is a decision most parents have to manage at some point. Games that also include Roblox and Fortnite have been exploited by predators who attempt to groom children via in-game chat servers or a separate messaging service. A 23-year-old man from Wales was jailed in 2017 for targeting two boys, aged 12 and 14, using Skype, Snapchat and text messages while they played Minecraft.
Radicalisation through gaming is another concern. A report by the Royal United Services Institute, published in December, found that Minecraft was one of a number of games being used as a far-right recruitment tool. The report featured images of a replica Nazi concentration camp where caricatures of Jewish people were depicted being burnt en masse.
Microsoft’s Cooper, whose own teenage children grew up playing Minecraft, says the company takes such dangers very seriously, and that, bar rare cases of abuse, the game’s family-friendly reputation is no accident. “We pour tremendous resources into making sure it’s safe and secure,” he says.
Microsoft advises parents to update the game regularly to include the latest security features. It also disables the multiplayer mode as a default for child accounts on some versions of the game and features parental controls that can limit access to online play, for example to “friends” only. The company’s approach also involves moderating online interactions, building filters to block certain words and reviewing user-generated content.
From the virtual world to the real
There have been Minecraft brand partnerships with Lego and clothing companies such as Burberry, Lacoste and Puma that spawned in-game adventures, skin packs and real-world toys and clothing ranges. But Microsoft limits the number and nature of these tie-ups so that the game doesn’t feel like a glorified billboard.
“They’ve never sold out by letting companies like, I don’t know, McDonald’s do cheap activations in the game,” says James Delaney, a British gamer and entrepreneur. He was 16 when he started playing Minecraft in 2012. He’d loved Lego as a child. “Ironically there’s more of a permanence in Minecraft, in the sense that what you make can live forever,” he says.
When Delaney, who’s now 28, posted images of the fantastical buildings he was building in Minecraft on the Reddit social network, brands started to get in touch. Blockworks, the company he founded from his home in London, has since created a virtual staff training programme for PepsiCo, in which employees work in a simulated distribution warehouse, and a Minecraft-themed promotional video for the Batman v Superman film for Warner Bros. Delaney worked on his first commissions in his bedroom after school, creating content for brands directly.
After graduating from Cambridge University with a degree in architecture, he began to focus on social impact projects. In 2020 Blockworks launched the Uncensored Library for the journalism advocacy group Reporters Without Borders. Built in a neoclassical style from more than 12 million Minecraft blocks, it acts as what Delaney calls a “Trojan horse” for books and articles banned by some regimes in the real world, representing them as plain text in virtual books within the game. Among them are articles by the jailed Russian dissident Alexander Skobov and the murdered Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi. Delaney says the articles have been clicked on more than eight million times and that readers have logged in from countries including Saudi Arabia and Russia.
In 2019 Delaney joined the board of Block by Block, a Microsoft-funded UN charity that uses Minecraft as a tool for communities to reimagine public spaces. People’s designs within the game can be turned into architectural drawings and built in the real world. Its projects have included a skate park designed by a 12-year-old boy in Pristina, the capital of Kosovo. “Minecraft is an unlikely hero of democratic design,” Delaney says.
Persson the billionaire
For Markus Persson the game became a drag. By 2014 he was getting flak from die-hard fans over some of the ways the game was evolving commercially. In June that year he tweeted: “Anyone want to buy my share of Mojang so I can move on with my life? Getting hate for trying to do the right thing is not my gig.” A Microsoft executive called the company seconds after seeing the tweet. It took three months to strike a deal. Microsoft bought Mojang and Minecraft for £1.5 billion in September 2014.
Persson left Mojang weeks later (the company continues to operate in Stockholm under Microsoft’s ownership). Newly minted as a billionaire, he continued to make new games but has not scored a second hit. In the meantime Microsoft has distanced itself from the Minecraft founder over things he said on Twitter after he sold Mojang. He called feminism a “social disease”, made transphobic comments and expressed support for the QAnon far-right conspiracy theory. Persson, who is now 45, did not respond to requests for an interview.
Microsoft is understandably anxious to protect the game’s clean image. Sliding into diplomat mode, Cooper says the Swede was “influential in creating Minecraft” but that its true legacy is its community of creators and players.
Microsoft now appears to be milking the franchise for all it’s worth. Just as its sandbox essence provides unlimited scope for creative play, Minecraft is also a blank canvas for other brands and storytellers. “The attraction is a breadth that works at a global scale,” says Paul Moreton, chief development officer at Merlin, who is tight-lipped about how the company is reimagining Minecraft as a theme park.
Dark Horse Comics, a US publisher of graphic novels, has a deal with Mojang Studios to release children’s books based in the Minecraft world. Heart of Cobblestone, the first in a trilogy written by the British author Andrew Clemson, came out last year and tells the story of a farmer who retreats to a tower after mobs have ruined his crops. “If I had approached someone like Star Wars, there would have been the stress of having to adhere to years of storylines,” Clemson says. “This is so fun because I can just start from a blank slate.”
iPads off!
Back in Bromley, Innis and Fife have taken a break from their screens to play in the garden. “They still love nature and bug hunting, but I do have a bit of regret because Minecraft is the priority now,” Dan, their father, admits. “It does feel as though we’re losing them a bit.”
He thinks Minecraft is much better than Doom or Grand Theft Auto, the games he played when he was younger. “It feels a bit more educational.” Hester is sceptical. “When Fife plays he just sits there going, “Die, die, die!” she says, hammering her finger on an imaginary screen.
She says she does limit screen time. But there’s no going back. Innis has been to Minecraft holiday clubs at school. Fife had a Minecraft-themed sixth birthday party, including a creeper cake. Soon the boys come back inside. Fife takes off his wet jumper to change into a Minecraft onesie, then they dash back upstairs to their iPads.
Talking blocks
Block
A basic building unit that can be mined (eg dirt, wood) or crafted (eg stairs)
Biome
A region within a game with its own landscape, flora and fauna
Mob
Short for a “mobile entity” or non-player character such as a skeleton, zombie or animal
Boss mob
A hostile, more powerful mob likely to be aggressive to players
Creeper
A hostile mob that explodes, damaging blocks and players
Mod
Short for modification, this is a change players can make to the basic game to add new elements
Resource pack
Downloadable add-on that can change the appearance of the game (texture pack) or a player’s avatar (skin pack)
- A Minecraft Movie, which was filmed in New Zealand last year, is due for release here on April 3.
Written by: Simon Usborne
© The Times of London
