By Tyler Piccotti and Tony Moore
Notch is the online persona of Markus Persson, the Swedish video game programmer who created Minecraft.
Who Is Notch?
Markus Persson, better known by his gaming handle Notch, is the Swedish video game programmer who created Minecraft. Notch began writing computer code by age 8 and, although he never finished high school, landed a programming job when he was 18. It wasn’t long before he was creating his own games on the side, and his first release in 2009’s Minecraft became a colossal international success. The sandbox-style game—one of the most influential video games in history—has spurred multiple spinoffs and the 2025 live-action film A Minecraft Movie. In 2014, Notch and his cofounders sold their company, Mojang, and the game that put the developer on the map to Microsoft for $2.5 billion.
Early Years
Notch, who real name is Markus Alexej Persson, was born in Stockholm on June 1, 1979. The Swedish boy grew up in the small town of Edsbyn, surrounded by forests that would later influence his video game design for Minecraft. Persson was an obsessive Lego builder until he was 7 and his father brought home a Commodore 128 computer. The boy latched right on to the point of faking stomachaches to stay home from school and write code. By the time he was 8, he had written his first computer program.
The computer whiz never finished high school, but he had been teaching himself how to write code ever since his dad gave him the Commodore. To bolster his natural talent, his mother made him take an online programming course. His experience led to a programming job when he was 18.
After a few more gigs, in 2004, he landed with Midasplayer (now King), the company known for such hugely popular titles as Candy Crush. There, Persson befriended fellow developer Jakob Porsér. It wasn’t long before Persson and Porsér were writing their own games, but their Midasplayer bosses didn’t like the attention these games were garnering the duo. So in 2009, Persson left Midasplayer for jAlbum and began spending all his free time creating.
Minecraft Creator
Notch wrote his first big game, Minecraft, in just a week. He rushed through it simply so he could get to his next idea. The developer initially called it “Cave Game” then Minecraft: Order of the Stone before settling on the simplified name we know today. The premise of the game is similarly straightforward: players collect various implements and natural resources from the open-world, Lego-like playing field to build houses, cities, or whatever else they envision.
Despite Notch’s launching the game in May 2009 before he even considered it finished, Minecraft struck a chord with players, and soon it became something of a phenomenon, with 400 copies selling per day for about $6 dollars per download. That success ended both Notch’s and his friend Jakob Porsér’s life of working for other people, and they started their own business, Mojang, with Carl Manneh. The company’s name means “gadget” in Swedish.
Minecraft moved about 20,000 downloads in its first year, but by the end of the next year, it was often getting that many downloads per day. With the added sales came a huge and ever-growing group of players, and Minecraft became as much a community as a game. Without a doubt, Persson was the witty, often cantankerous mayor of the realm. His large online presence as Notch, his gaming handle, made him into a gaming superstar. His social media accounts are also under Notch or similar variations.
Originally published at Biography.com
