A Moogle  🏳️‍🌈 💻 🎮 🎶 🇸🇪

I was hired (and agreed to be hired) based on the promise given by Carl, the CEO at the time, during my interview, that the company was committed to being indie, and had enough money to keep going for 10 years if the bottom fell out of the profitability of Minecraft.

I joined the company because I was tired of working for studios owned by larger corporations, and wanted to be part of something bigger, yet smaller, if that makes any sense.

In early 2014, there were rumblings about the fact that various popular servers were ostensibly selling game mechanics part and parcel: "Hey, if you 'donate' this much, you'll get a diamond sword, never mind that the diamond sword is part of the base game, wink-wink".

This incensed Markus, and he insisted that we revise our EULA and/or start enforcing it as it was written. We, the people actually working on Minecraft at the time, prematurely announced that we'd take a hard-line stance on the EULA, a stance which never in fact materialized.

But that in and of itself did all the damage - people went positively apoplectic. Folks started hurling (text-based) verbal abuse at Markus on Twitter, and just about any other forum through which they could get hold of him.

Now as someone who has been a contributor to MAME since 2002 or so, and has experienced first-hand how toxic the emulation community can be, his reaction baffled me. Not to excuse abuse, but the Internet is filled with bastards. If you make a controversial decision, get a helmet.

At any rate, he disappeared for 2-3 weeks. In the meantime, about a week into this break, Carl took us on the Java team into a meeting, and explained to us what was going on: Markus is looking to sell the company. Cue the "DUN DUN DUNNNNNN" sample.

This was around July 2014. We had to sit on this info until the deal was finalized. Ultimately, it was September when the news finally leaked. The news hit us like a sack of hammers. It destroyed productivity at the studio during the time that he was on vacation.

Almost every day, we would work until around 16:00, 17:00, then numbly wander down Southside Pub nearby in Södermalm and commiserate over beers. Not so much because we felt that we'd been betrayed, but because we had nobody to direct us, to put our collective minds at ease.

So very many things came out during those collective beer-vent sessions. Unfortunately, they are things that I cannot ultimately relay here, as it is unverifiable second-hand information, and I would prefer to stick to first-hand facts: They're damning enough.

First-hand? Things like bringing what seemed to be a sex worker to the office after-hours on Valentine's Day 2014. Don't get me wrong, nothing's wrong with sex as trade. What I find unseemly is how she was never seen again around the office, and how he never spoke of it.

No, what really underscored the truth of the maxim, "Never meet your heroes", were two particular incidents. I asked him after he'd gotten back from his vacation, if he would still keep in touch. "No," he laughed, "Honestly I'm going to try to forget about all of you."

The other was that some months prior, I'd loaned him a book that I thought was really cool: "Show Stopper! The Breakneck Race to Create Windows NT", by G. Pascal Zachary. It's a nice balance of a verbal documentary, docu-drama, and non-fiction. Well, I got it back. Somewhat.

When he was cleaning out his office in preparation to leave, he binned it. I wasn't able to find it among the trash bags of his things that he just left behind. When I contacted him about it, he dutifully bought me a used copy (fair enough, it's out of print) from Amazon.

A used copy which was in manifestly worse shape than the one that I had loaned to him. Ultimately, transphobic, alt-right-sympathizing tweets aside, that one incident really speaks to his character: Doing the minimum necessary to get people off his back.

The crowning achievement was some months after he'd left, when he decided to break the silence in the form of a blog post about how he'd left the company for reasons that amounted to "people were mean to me on the Internet". The undertone of that post was it all being about him.

Absolutely no acknowledgement that it was ultimately his impotent rage at servers having the temerity to resell portions of the game that caused the whole fiasco to begin with.

No recognition that his decision caused a dramatic impact, good *and* bad, on 30+ people, because of his own rage over people taking advantage of loopholes in the EULA. No, it was about how being called "fat" by ignorant teens. Which is not okay, but let's have some perspective.

Now, years on, I feel at partially vindicated. Now that he's started openly turning into an alt-right mouthpiece, going on about how he'd "rather be a fascist dick than a trans vagina", people have at least somewhat started to clock that hey, maybe this guy is broken.

People ask "What happened?" Well, nothing happened, he's the same person he's always been. Most of the good things that Minecraft is associated with had nothing to do with him. The Block-By-Block UN effort? Lydia and Vu's idea. Community outreach? Owen.

At the end of the day, the impression that people have about Markus's involvement in Minecraft is illusory. The most positive aspects of the project are down to other team members who wanted to leverage the company's position to do some real good in the world.

As for me? I don't have clean hands, either. I was trash. I joined the company to placate my ego, thinking I was hot shit. I wasn't. I'm just this programmer dude. True happiness comes from working with so many others on a project everyone in the team is passionate about.