Mojang was established in Sweden back in 2009. It is a Scandinavian video game creator. The company earned a lot of fame for developing one of the best-selling and most popular games in the world – Minecraft.
Who is The Founder of Mojang?
Mojang was founded by Markus Perrson, a half-Swedish and half-Finnish man who lives in Stockholm, Sweden. He was born on June 1, 1979, and as soon as he was able, began to develop games. His first game was created when he was a text-based adventure game and he created it when he was only eight. He retained his love of programming for many years until he decided to found Mojang with another man named Jacob Porser. Markus immediately put into production a game he originally would call “Cavegame” but would later be changed to the very popular worldwide game called Minecraft. Markus likes to be called by his Minecraft username ‘Notch’.
How Mojang Started?
The programmer and designer Markus Perrson showed interest in video games from an early age. He used to play several pirate games on his home computer and learned programming when he was 8 years old with his sister’s help.
Following his graduation and working as a website developer for a few years, Markus developed MMORPG (massively multiplayer online role-playing game) ‘Wurm Online’ in 2003. His colleague Rolf Jansson was also a part of this venture. They chose to work under the title Mojang Specifications.
The game started generating profit under the name Mojang Specifications AB. However, Persson decided to leave the project but wished to keep the name. Hence, Jansson retitled his company Onetoofree AB and then Code Club AB. On the other hand, Markus joined Midas and developed 25 to 30 games.
Markus Perrson started working on a game developed by Zachtronics – a clone of Infiniminer. Later, he reused the parts of an engine code from his earlier project and launched the alpha version of the video game, now known as Minecraft. He reused the title Mojang Specifications for this project.
It took less than a month for Minecraft to generate revenue. By May 2010, Persson was able to get off his day job and concentrate on the project fully.
First Game – Minecraft
The first-ever game created by Mojang was Minecraft in the late 2010. Initially, the game was created for the computer, then they made it available for mobile users, and then finally for Xbox 360.
Minecraft was designed to submerge a player into a sandbox world where the only limit was the player’s imagination. Minecraft is a complete sandbox game where there are now three game modes, survival, creative, and hardcore.
- Survival is where every mob, or monster, in the game can hurt you and you have to survive by building houses, mining resources deep under the ground, and planting food. In survival the resources are limited, so you must come up with creative ways to restock those resources and keep playing the game.
- The second gamemode, creative, is where you are basically the god of the world. You have unlimited resources, access to flight, and special in-game commands that allow you to do anything you want, whether that builds a huge castle, or shows off special machines built with a material called Redstone.
- The final gamemode, hardcore is only for the players who desire an even greater challenge than survival. Hardcore thrusts you into a world where you only have one life, you regenerate health slower, and the mobs are significantly more powerful. If you die even once in hardcore, your world is automatically deleted from your game, never to be seen again.
Other Game By Mojang – Scrolls
Mojang developed another game soon after Minecraft was released. It is called Scrolls, and Mojang aimed to create a new type of game that combined themes and elements from board games with strategy and tactics, to create the perfect world of war. Scrolls involve the summoning of fantastic creatures, spells, enchantments, machines of war into the game to battle it out with your other rival players and friends. You can summon creatures, whose variety ranges from powerful human warriors, to terrible demons and beasts of the wild.
Sci-fi Game – Cobalt
Mojang collaborated with another gaming company called Oxeye Game Studio in the creation of a new sci-fi game called Cobalt. Cobalt is a game where you fight as small robots in an arena. This may sound like your average shooter game, but it is most definitely not. A very cool feature about this game is that when the bullets approach you, time slows down around you, allowing you to do fantastic leaps and dodges around the arena.
Project 0x10c
Notch, as a separate side project, recently began working on a new game called 0x10c. This was meant to be a similar game to Minecraft, except it would be more of a sci-fy version that included planets, smooth space to planet transitions, and space stations. Unfortunately for the gaming community, Notch decided to go to other things because he got bored with working on 0x10c. However, a version of the game might still be released as a hardcore group of fans are currently working on the game, building on how they think Notch might have designed it himself.
Mojam Charity Competition
Mojam 2013 is the name of the annual charity competition in which 6 gaming companies were challenged to make a game within 60 hours. Besides Mojang, other participants were Ludosity, Grapefrukt, Vlamber, Oxeye Game Studio, and Wolfire Games.
Companies were able to make their games before the 60 hours deadline. Mojang created Nuclear Pizza War, Battle Frogs, Endless Nuclear Kittens, and Nuke the Dinosaurs. Whereas Ludosity created Space Hunk, Grapefrukt made Tektonik, 3918 was created by Oxeye Game Studio, Wolfire Games made Low-Light, and Vlamber created Wasteland Kings.
All the created games were available for download to those who donated charity to Mojang. After the competition, Mojang was able to raise 478 thousand dollars for charity. Every game was downloaded by a huge number of users.
Moreover, Markus goes on a server from YouTube with many celebrities. He competes with different teams and players in the game which gets recorded and later uploaded on YouTube for the audience to enjoy. The donated money while playing the game goes to charity.
Mojang Current Projects
Mojang to this day is still working feverishly to release better, more sophisticated versions of the games they already have out. They may also be working on new games to release to the public soon, though none of this information has been disclosed to the public. Mojang aims to bring a new era of games to the community.