The Man Who Built Minecraft in a Week

Markus "Notch" Persson built the first playable version of Minecraft on his own, in a single week, from a flat in Stockholm. It went on to become the best-selling video game in history, with no publisher and no investors behind it.

Early programming years

Persson was born in Stockholm in 1979 and found coding at age seven, when his father brought home a Commodore 128. He wrote his first text-adventure game by eight, and later skipped a conventional path to pursue programming full time.

Years of indie development

Long before Minecraft, Persson worked at software companies including Midasplayer, later King. In the evenings and at weekends he entered game jams like Ludum Dare and shipped a stream of experimental games, most of which got little attention outside indie circles. He was building constantly, in public, for years.

Minecraft's creation

In 2009, inspired by Infiniminer, Persson built the first playable Minecraft in one week. Rather than chase a traditional publishing deal, he posted it online anyway, to the TIGSource forum. It caught on organically, selling around 400 copies a day within weeks.

Explosive growth

The community turned Minecraft into a phenomenon. Players built cities, shared videos, and pushed the game far beyond what one developer imagined. In 2014, Microsoft acquired Mojang for $2.5 billion.

Why this matters

Persson's story is a reminder that the best builders are often invisible to traditional hiring. No CV captured what he could do, his work did. That is exactly the gap Vaultt exists to close: judge people on what they have actually built, not the words on a page.