Markus Persson

Markus Persson is a Swedish video-game designer and programmer whose 2009 creation of Minecraft — the block-based sandbox game — produced one of the 21st-century international video-game commercial breakthroughs. He was born Markus Alexej Persson on June 1, 1979, in Stockholm, Sweden, into an mixed Swedish-Finnish family. He started programming on a Commodore 128 at age seven and taught himself computer programming through his 1980s and 1990s teenage years.

His professional video-game career began in 2005 when he was hired by Swedish game developer Midasplayer (later King.com — the developer of Candy Crush Saga). The 2009 launch of his personal project Minecraft — initially under the stage name "Notch" — shifted his career trajectory.

The Minecraft alpha-testing release on May 17, 2009 — initially as a browser-based personal-project demo — launched what became one of the 21st-century international video-game phenomena. The 2010 founding of Mojang (the Stockholm video-game studio that Persson co-founded with Carl Manneh and Jakob Porsér) and the 2011 official 1.0 release of Minecraft expanded the game across multiple platforms.

The September 2014 Microsoft acquisition of Mojang for $2.5 billion — the largest video-game-studio acquisition in 2014 — made Persson the foundational figure of one of the 21st-century video-game commercial breakthroughs. The Minecraft has continued to be the best-selling video game in history (over 350 million copies sold across multiple platforms by 2024). Persson left Mojang in November 2014 following the Microsoft acquisition and has withdrawn from public Minecraft-related commentary since 2017 due to substantial public-relations controversies. He has been continuously visible on social media (particularly Twitter / X) as an recurring video-game-industry public commentator. The 2025 live-action A Minecraft Movie film starring Jason Momoa and Jack Black grossed over $700 million worldwide.

His name Markus is the German and Scandinavian form of Mark (from the Latin Marcus). Markus has been continuously climbing in American naming since the 2010s.