Notch

Background

Markus Alexej Persson is a Swedish game designer that is highly-revered within and outside Silicon Valley. His amazing games, philanthropic nature, and approachability to his fans have earned him a supportive fan base. Persson was born on June 1, 1979, in Stockholm, Sweden. His father, Birger Persson, was Swedish, and his mother, Ritva, was Finnish. Hence, Persson is a Gemini of Finnish and Swedish heritage. For the first seven years of his life, Persson lived in Edsbyn with his family and later moved back to Stockholm. Persson’s interest in programming came early as he started using his father’s home computer, a Commodore 128, to program.

Persson started working for King Digital Entertainment, a video game publisher and the maker of the beloved “Candy Crush” game, in 2005. Four years later, he left King and got a job at jAlbum, the cross-platform photo website. Persson then started developing “Minecraft” in 2009. In the same year, he founded the video game-developing company, Mojang. “Minecraft” became public in 2009 and was released under Mojang in November 2011. The game became a massive success selling over 238 million copies and having 140 million active users monthly.

Three years after “Minecraft” was released, it was sold to Microsoft for $2.5 billion in November 2014. Persson is a high-successful game developer, but he’s not liked on social media due to his unpopular opinions. Following his streak of polemic tweets, Microsoft dissociated itself from him. As a famous billionaire game designer, Persson shares his success with his daughter, an offspring from his first and only marriage to Elin Zetterstrand in 2011.