A Moogle  🏳️‍🌈 💻 🎮 🎶 🇸🇪

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.