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Comment by ugh | Hacker News Reader

Minecraft’s story is even more impressive than the article makes it seem. The game was not developed by a few people, it was developed by one guy (“Notch”). He hired six people only recently and they started working together around Winter 2010/2011.

He now gets help with the business and support side of running a company but only one of the developers he hired is working on the game with him together. The other developer is getting their next game up and running.

What’s also interesting is that Notch does not want to run the business, at least not at the scale at which it is now. He hired people to do that for him.

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Notch is amazing. In case you missed it the first time:

"Time-lapse screencap video of a games programmer"

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1629810

Go Java!!

If you think Minecraft is an impressive one-man project, have you ever played Cave Story? (Doukutsu Monogatari)

Or Love (Eskil Steenberg) http://www.quelsolaar.com/love/

Love is a neat game. Steenberg's toolchain for building the game, on the other hand, is incredible: http://www.quelsolaar.com/love/tool_video.html

Agreed. Doukutsu Monogatari is, rivaled only by Braid, the most beautiful, fun, and moving video game I have ever played. It is astonishingly creative and innovative. The gameplay is challenging, but fun. And there’s not even a hint of repetition.

It is a masterpiece. I wish that I could play it again for the first time.

Thank you both.

What’s also interesting is that Notch does not want to run the business, at least not at the scale at which it is now. He hired people to do that for him.

Do you think that might be a concern? I would very much love to see Notch continue to be successful, and it would be a shame to see him lose his multi-million dollar company due to silly legal reasons.

What's really interesting is that it's not Mojang that has the following, it's Notch. If Notch gets screwed, he has tons of loyal fans who will jump to his defense. Unless he does something stupid himself (and he doesn't seem the type), he'll have a strong following for a long time.

Very true. Did not think of that.

I don’t know the internal structure of the company but I would assume that Notch legally has all the control. Whoever runs the business can presumably be vetoed by Notch at any time.

I don’t see any problems with that, at least if Notch hired the right people. If you think that running a business (that’s not just one guy selling a game on the Internet but a real business with an office and employees and all the rest) is not your strength and if you much rather want to spend most of your time coding it should be possible to let someone else run the business for you.

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