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Comment by Nickoladze | Hacker News Reader

Basically "I was successful once, it was awful".

Sometimes I wish he would have just stuck with Minecraft as the only developer and stayed away from the spotlight. Plenty of very popular game creators have done so (Icefrog, Toady One).

I really enjoyed the times back when Minecraft was just getting popular and you could tell Notch was adding features that he genuinely enjoyed (Redstone update, for instance). Then he started up a giant company and started assuming responsibility for things like server admins charging money, when he should have sat back and let people do what they want.

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More like “I was famous once, it was awful.”

His fame had never much of anything to do with the success of Minecraft. It just came with it and it didn’t really work out. It doesn’t seem like he has a problem with many people playing his game (or making money doing what he loves to do), he has a problem with being famous.

Watch the video he references, it makes many of the same points.

>Basically "I was successful once, it was awful".

This seems to be a theme. The guy who had the frontpage the other day, flappy bird, etc. Must be nice to have the cash entitlements to "keep it real." I can't blame him, I think money just becomes arbitrary numbers after a certain point. Minecraft has probably grown to a point where its just only going to get smaller in the future and in a few years be a fun little nostalgia piece for the tweens today who will be in college, the same way we dusted off the NES when I was in college.

Obviously, there's something about the nerdy personality that wants none of this, but it really makes me wonder about guys like Gates or Carmack or Zuckerberg or Jobs who thrive in these environments. Are they the rare ones or are guys like Notch the outliers?

I don't know that I'd lump Carmack in with the rest of your list. Yes, he is quite financially successful from id, but he never stopped being, first and foremost, a coder who will sometimes just disappear for a few weeks to separate himself from the world and get coding done.

I wouldn't list Jobs either for almost the opposite reason in that while he had a huge impact on the tech industry, he was always a "suit" (even if he didn't wear one).

Good point, but he always came off as a hard-ass to me who liked to get into arguments and thrive on stress. I kinda see him as his own Jobs-Woz combo. I may be misreading him.

Yeah there's a lot of nuance there to be certain. Carmack is at least pretty Randian/Objectivist from what I've seen of his public statements, which deviates quite a bit from the traditional hippie left-leaning coder-type (though of course there are great developers all across the political spectrum).

Icefrog may have stayed away from the spotlight (which is quite impressive), but DOTA has not evolved how you suggested. He is by no means the sole developer, given that Valve is hauling ass behind that as pretty much their flagship game of the decade.

Maybe it's because Valve is near and dear to the gamers, but I think they've been keeping their community happier than if Icefrog was still running this as a solo job on a WC3 mod. I daresay it has been better for the game too.

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