All you need to know about Notch

Minecraft creator Markus “Notch” Persson recently spoke to Rolling Stone magazine about his life, his company Mojang, and what he does when he isn’t working on new projects.

This was after he had finished a stint of Borderlands 2, though. “I feel like it’s consuming me,” said Persson of the game, which he has been playing religiously over recent weeks.

The man can afford to play a bit of Borderlands now and then, with Mojang making over $300 million (R3,110,160,000) in revenue in 2013 – of which $128 million (R1,328,153,600) was profit. Rolling Stone estimated that Mojang is worth around $2 billion (R20 billion), the large majority of which was made off Minecraft.

During the three-days that Persson was interviewed, the magazine said he held one 10-minute meeting with staff, did no programming, and spent the rest of the time playing Borderlands 2. Persson said there are weeks were he does nothing but work, but that is not the case at the moment.

The interview also revealed the following interesting facts about Persson:

He taught himself to program on a Commodore 128 computer;
He never finished high school;
He wrote the original version of Minecraft in his Stockholm apartment in 2009 in about a week;
His father killed himself two weeks before Christmas in 2011;
He got married in 2011 but the relationship did not last, and they later divorced;
He doesn’t have a girlfriend now, but he is seeing someone;
His current apartment in Östermalm (“where the rich people live”) has an elevator and a walk-in wine cellar;
He’s moving to a new penthouse. When it’s finished, it will be the most expensive, per square meter, in all of Stockholm;
Every Friday, Persson lets Mojang employees play video games and/or work on personal projects.

Finally, Persson explains his 10-year plan for Mojang: “Hopefully, we are going to keep making money at Mojang, but if we don’t, that’s fine. We just have 10 fun years, and then, the last year, we’d say to our employees, ‘If we don’t make any money this year, Mojang is going to be dead. So you might want to look for new jobs.'”