Minecraft, Scrolls, 0x10c: The past, present and future of Mojang as seen through Notch's eyes | Polygon

"It's just some kind of weird creative block that's been going on for too long and [0x10c] is going to be put on ice until we can fix that."

Persson sat down with me during last week's Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. We talked on a second-floor overlook of the W Hotel's bar, a popular hang-out during the show for developers, agents, analysts, business development types and, inevitably, journalists.

Always affable, Persson popped in on the tail end of my interview with Scrolls developer and Mojang co-founder Jakob Porser and then agreed to hang around a bit to talk about his company, projects he's working on and the game that financed it all: Minecraft.

While Minecraft was pushed live as an early playable alpha game in 2009, it wasn't officially released until 2011. Since its release, the game has managed to rack up nearly 25 million copies sold across the PC, mobile and Xbox 360 versions.

Persson no longer has any direct connection with Minecraft's continuing evolution. He handed that game's future off to Jens Bergensten in December, 2011, shortly after the game's final release to PC. But sometimes he swings by to see what they're doing, he said.

"Often it's like this weird stuff I have no idea that they're going to add, like these light sensors or stuff that's pretty cool, but I try not to give my opinions about it," he said.

He doesn't even play the game anymore.

"I think I played it for far too many, like hundreds of hours," he said. "I think the last time I played it was basically the Xbox version, just running around and exploring, because that's the part I never got bored of, just exploring."

And when he did hop into the game he created, people rarely if ever believed it was him.

"These days people never believe me," he said. "I think in some servers they kind of let people come in with any name, and people kind of fake their names. So I always get accused of being fake."

Because some mods do that, there's no way that an API could support all existing mods, Persson said.

"I think there should be an API, it will be a bit unfortunate because people will want to make legit mods that can have an API that can sustain other versions," he said. "They won't be able to make as potent ones as the kinds that goes straight into the source code. But the ones that go straight into the source code might stop working when the next version of Minecraft comes out.

"I'm not involved in that part at all, but it seems like one of the bigger challenges is to kind of make sure that they don't conflict and how do you do that? It's going to need to be very clever."

Despite not being directly involved in the API debate, Persson is passionate about continued support for modding in Minecraft.

"It feels like basically half the game is what the community does with it," he said. "I think one of the reasons it works in Minecraft is that the creation is kind of game-defined. It's not just that you go into an editor mode and build the game and try to play it, but actually playing the game is building the tools."

Part of the issue Mojang faces with Minecraft is that the API wasn't built in from the beginning. The same will likely be true with 0x10c.

"I probably should (create an API for 0x10c), but I'm not, really," Persson said. "I kind of want to turn the modding into actually doing the programming within the game."

Why Minecraft isn't gory

Minecraft's mostly kid-friendly aesthetic was a happy accident, Persson said.

"When I first made the game it didn't need to have over-the-top violence because it wasn't really about the violence," he said. "There is violence, of course, there's moments of that stuff, but it's still kind of cartoony."

But at one point, Persson played around with the idea of focusing more on the violence found in the game. As he started to explore the possibility of making the game more gory he began to hear feedback from players that it wasn't a good idea because so many children were playing the game.

"So I just put up a poll asking people what they want," he said. "Should there be blood or not blood and people said, ‘No blood' and I just said, ‘OK'. So that's the direction for the game.

"It makes me very happy when people are saying that kids play it, because I have fond memories of the games I played as a kid. If I can give some kids those sort of memories that's really cool. And if it's not violent that's even better."

I asked him if he thinks that Minecraft's popularity could pave the way for more child-friendly games. As a parent, I said, I can just tell my son what he can or can't play, but it's great if the market helps by providing fun alternatives to popular, but violent games like Call of Duty.

"I think it kind of goes in cycles a little bit," Persson said. "There's been a fairly big focus on triple-A shooters for awhile ... I understand why shooters are so popular, it's very instant gratification. But the games I played as a child were far less violent ... so it kind of goes in cycles, and I guess if we can help break up the monopoly of the shooters, then that's awesome, but I think [Minecraft's popularity] is more a sign of the market being ready for it."

Persson said that even despite that approach they could perhaps come up with an API solution, but he's not sure how needed it will be.

"I don't know how much people are going to want to mod the game because you don't want to mod all games," he said. "Minecraft is very easy to mod, or easy to get ideas to mod because it is such a big sandbox thing."

Where Minecraft is a very easy game to understand at one glance, 0x10c isn't. I asked Persson to describe what the game is:

"It's some kind of space adventure, first-persony-running-around-trying-to-keep-your-ship-whole game," he said. And on some level it does have some similarities with Minecraft. "To a small degree, in the sense that the stuff that happens to you is randomly generated," he said. "You can modify your own ship, you very much have control of how it actually works."

The basic premise of 0x10c is that everything in a gamer's ship will be "real in some sense."

"So the computers are like these real virtual computers that you can program," he said, "and there are wires running electricity to them."

Persson has already released the virtual CPU specifications and the community is already playing around with that.

This overt complexity is both what drives Persson's personal interest in the development and what sets it apart from Minecraft.

"It's fairly complex," Persson tells me after I ask him if confusion about the game is something unique to me. "The idea is to make it easier so you don't really see the complexities."

That's how Minecraft started. It too was an immensely complex game, and it still is if you consider everything you can do in it, but unlike 0x10c, Minecraft does a fantastic job of hiding all of that complexity.

"It's like, you can move a block and place it, that's basically all you see at the beginning," Persson said. "Then you sort of figure out all of the systems that are going on in there. So 0x10c is going to be way more complex."

And try as they might to hide it, that complexity will sort of be in your face from the get go.

"It's not going to be like Dwarf Fortress, where it's basically hostile toward the player, but it's amazing once you get into it. It's going to be some kind of valid in-between."

Persson's hope is that the game will attract two types of people: those who want to create experiences within 0x10c and those who want to play in those experiences.

"I mean the most complex bit is that CPU, the programming of the computer," Persson said. "But if you get to the point where people can share what they make in the game, the complexity would basically be: You choose which kind of computer game you would want because someone else has written it."

In many ways 0x10c sounds like a love letter to the sort of game development that gave birth to Minecraft: One person toiling away on one game and then releasing it to a massive, interested audience.

Is it a game for game developers, I asked.

"Yeah," he said, "a little bit. At least part of the game is for them and then the idea is those developers, they kind of form the superstars within the game because they make the software for the ships in the game. And then you get people who are really good pilots but they don't have code. So, they get their friend to code for them.

But while 0x10c is designed to support game building within the game itself, it won't be as innately moddable as Minecraft it. Not even close, Persson said.

"Because with modding you can do literally anything," he said. "You can change everything to make it look like photorealistic and the idea within 0x10c was to have enough components going on so you can kind of just setup the components in the spaceship and just write the code inside the game."

Think of it as a sort of holodeck within a game. But you couldn't use the spaceship CPU to subvert the basic tenets of the game. Put another way, players would be working within the confines of the existing system when coding in 0x10c, not dipping into the game's raw code.

And if released, 0x10c won't have any link, literally or narratively, to Minecraft. Though Persson said players will recognize its aesthetic and gameplay style as something born of the makers of Minecraft.

Narrative in games is something that Persson seems mostly disinterested in. While Minecraft is host to endless stories, none of them were really created by Mojang. Both Scrolls and 0x10c will have a backstory to get you to the cusp of gameplay, to explain what happened and why you're there. But so far there's no story driving any of Mojang's games.

"I haven't decided yet if we want to have some kind of story" for 0x10c, he said. "Are we actually getting someone to write it or if we just want to leave it more open. I'm still deciding.

"I basically don't care about narrative in all the games. It's very rare that I do. I usually just skip, skip, skip, skip. I have no idea why I'm killing this guy. It's like the game mechanics are interesting and then all of a sudden you don't really know, ‘What, he was my friend?' OK. I think I'm just one of those gamers who is kind of more interested in mechanics."

While Mojang has its near future sketched out in terms of game development, Persson continues to play around with new ideas and ways to make games. Currently he's been tinkering with HTML5 game development to try and determine what the platform is capable of.

"I think it's kind of an interestingly unifying, very easily accessible to people," he said. "You can have a click to play link and then instantly be playing a game. So I think it's kind of an appealing platform."

Persson says that he believes JavaScript is almost fast enough to support the sorts of games he would want to make, but this experimenting remains a personal interest for now. He has no plans to release a game in HTML5.

"I've been doing this forever," he said of his hobby game development habits. "Whenever I'm not working, I'm making games in my spare time."