A Moogle  🏳️‍🌈 💻 🎮 🎶 🇸🇪

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.