With Minecraft finally being released last month after two years of development, creator Markus “Notch” Persson has announced that he will no longer be acting as lead developer.
The reins have been handed over to partner Jens Bergensten, or Jeb, who was originally hired at Mojang’s back-end developer to work on Scrolls, but gradually became increasingly involved in Minecraft’s development.
Speaking to Gamasutra, Persson says while it’s a scary move for him, “we’ve [Persson and Bergensten] worked close enough for long enough for me to feel confident about it.”
“He’s exactly what Minecraft needs right now. He’s a bit more mod friendly than I am, and we need to embrace mods more.”
While Bergensten was the perfect fit, Persson admits that stepping down as lead developer wasn’t easy. “Yes, it was [tough]… not to hand it to him – he’s the perfect match – but just reaching the decision. It’s my baby, after all!”
The move was by no means a hasty decision, according to Bergensten Persson had been mulling it over for quite some time.
“I’m not sure when the idea came up the first time (from Notch), but it has been a few months now,” he explains. “We all knew that Notch was going to work on other things after release, so it kind of seemed natural for me to ‘take over'”.
So what’s next for Minecraft? Bergensten says his number one priority is the much-sought-after mod API.
“The game needs an API, so end users can obtain the mods without hassle…. I’m not going to do it all by myself though. We have a new programmer beginning in January, and we are talking to existing mod API teams, such as Bukkit, Minecraft Forge, and Minecraft Coder Pack.”
Don’t get too excited however, as Bergensten says the API will be coming “no sooner than March”.
As for Persson, he has a few things in development, but he’s most eager to start a new project entirely.
“We have some stuff in the pipeline that I might work on. But what I really want to do is to do something new.”
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