People and Organizations

How to use this page: arranged in two sections, "People" and "Organizations," three to six lines per entry. For reference, not commentary.

1People

1.1Markus "Notch" Persson

The creator of Minecraft. Inspired by Infiniminer and similar work, he began development in 2009 under the name Cave Game, then sold a paid Alpha openly on the forums — the "sell it while building it" development route (From Infiniminer to Cave Game, Alpha: Developing in Public). In June 2009 he registered the "Mojang Specifications" trade name as an individual; on September 17, 2010, he founded Mojang AB together with Jakob Porsér, with Carl Manneh as CEO (Mojang, Beta, and the Release Version). He led design until December 2, 2011, when he handed the lead to Jens Bergensten and his name faded from the changelogs (Mojang, Beta, and the Release Version). On September 15, 2014, alongside the acquisition announcement, he declared he was leaving Mojang; the official line was that he no longer wanted the responsibility of owning a company of this size. Carl Manneh and Jakob Porsér announced their departures the same day (The Microsoft Acquisition). There is also one oft-cited anecdote: before Terraria's release, he introduced the then-in-development game to his Twitter followers (Competition, Imitation, and Industry Influence).

1.2Jens "Jeb" Bergensten

A Mojang programmer who took over lead design of Minecraft from Notch on December 2, 2011, and still steers the game's creative direction (Mojang, Beta, and the Release Version, The Microsoft Acquisition). Before the handover he was the one who processed the piston's absorption into the game: he saw Hippoplatimus's piston mod and made the code handover happen (Mods as the Second Author). When the command block was revealed in 2012, it was pitched as "a new block for extending adventure mode" (Commands, Datapacks, and Maps). The main edition sums up his era as three shifts in style: from "adding things" to "daring to redo" (the 1.9 attack cooldown), from personal taste to theme-led major-version development, and the engineering burden of keeping Java Edition and Bedrock Edition consistent across two tracks (The Microsoft Acquisition).

1.3Carl Manneh

One of Mojang's co-founders and CEO from the company's founding on September 17, 2010 (Mojang, Beta, and the Release Version). Under him the company grew from a personal project into a team of a few dozen (order of magnitude) and reached the 2014 acquisition. On September 15, 2014, he announced his departure the same day as Notch and Jakob Porsér (The Microsoft Acquisition).

1.4Searge (Michael Stoyke)

Author of the Minecraft Coder Pack (MCP): a toolset that maps the officially obfuscated class and function names back to readable ones, on which nearly everyone making mods worked from 2010 onward (Mods as the Second Author). The main edition also records the nature of this "translation": the officials never authorized anyone to read their code, and never sued anyone for reading it. He was later hired into Mojang — one of the earliest examples of the officials' "hire the person, not the work" habit noted in the main edition (Mods as the Second Author).

1.5Hippoplatimus

A forum user and the author of the piston mod. He published this "block that pushes blocks" before Beta 1.7 and handed the code to Mojang; on June 30, 2011, pistons entered the main game with Beta 1.7, and his name entered the game's credits as "additional programming" — what the main edition calls the highest credit honor ever given to a work in the whole history of absorption (Mods as the Second Author). The redstone chapter takes him as the starting point of the two-way loop of "the community invents a part, the officials absorb it" (Redstone: Physics as Programming).

1.6Simon Collins-Laflamme

Co-founder of the Hypixel server (the other being Philippe Touchette); before entering the industry he was already known for making adventure maps. The server launched in April 2013 and peaked above 210,000 concurrent players in April 2021 (The Server Is the New Game). The game studio founded around that community was acquired by Riot Games in 2020 (The Server Is the New Game). On June 23, 2025, his game Hytale had its development cancelled and Hypixel Studios shut down; on November 17 of the same year he announced buying the Hytale IP back from Riot and rehiring 30 developers; on January 13, 2026, the game entered early access (Competition, Imitation, and Industry Influence).

1.7Wolvereness

A community pseudonym; the real name has never been made public. A long-time contributor to the Bukkit project. On September 5, 2014, he filed a DMCA takedown notice with GitHub: the code he had contributed to Bukkit was GPL-licensed, while CraftBukkit and its forks (Spigot included) distributed builds containing Mojang's proprietary, un-open-sourced code; GitHub honored the notice, and the relevant repositories went down overnight (The Server Is the New Game). The main edition records this notice as the first time the "second-author seat" was hit head-on by a legal instrument; the full text of the notice, together with the reply from Mojang's chief operating officer that it quotes, is preserved in GitHub's official DMCA archive repository (Mods as the Second Author).

2Organizations

2.1Mojang / Mojang Studios

The trade name "Mojang Specifications" was registered by Notch as an individual in June 2009; the name was picked up from his earlier stint on the online game Wurm Online — mojäng is Swedish for "little gadget." The actual company, Mojang AB, was founded on September 17, 2010, with Jakob Porsér as co-founder and Carl Manneh as CEO (Mojang, Beta, and the Release Version). After the acquisition closed on November 6, 2014, it became a wholly owned Microsoft subsidiary, keeping its Swedish legal entity with the development team retained in full; in 2020, with the launch of Minecraft Dungeons, it was renamed Mojang Studios (The Microsoft Acquisition).

2.2Microsoft (Xbox Game Studios)

On September 15, 2014, it announced the all-cash $2.5 billion acquisition of Mojang, which closed on November 6 the same year; Mojang was placed under what was then Microsoft Studios (today Xbox Game Studios) (The Microsoft Acquisition). The press release's word was "maintain": the PlayStation editions kept updating after the acquisition to this day, Java Edition went on receiving free updates, and not one update in ten years charged existing players; the transformation happened at the account layer (Java accounts migrated into Microsoft accounts from 2021) and in the placement of monetization (the Marketplace installed into Bedrock) (The Microsoft Acquisition, Two Product Lines: Java and Bedrock). From June 7, 2022, one PC purchase includes both Java Edition and Bedrock Edition (Two Product Lines: Java and Bedrock).

2.3NetEase

In May 2016, it jointly announced with Microsoft and Mojang that it had obtained the operating rights for Minecraft in mainland China; in October of the same year it signed the additional agreement for the Java Edition. The Windows client (Java Edition) launched in August 2017, iOS in September, and Android in October (The Revenue Structure). The China edition's contract differs from the global one: free to download, monetized through in-app purchases, all chat and text content passed through review, and rental servers restricted to numeric IDs. By official figures, registered users reached 300 million in November 2019 and passed 400 million in November 2020 (The Revenue Structure).

2.4TeacherGaming

An education company founded in 2011: Joel Levin, a New York computer-science teacher, brought Minecraft into his classroom and wrote a blog about it, and a Finnish education startup reached out to partner with him; the team was American teachers plus Finnish developers, six people in all (the main edition's footnote counts three developers and three teachers). Its product, MinecraftEdu, reworked Java Edition into a classroom client with teacher tools for freezing students, teleporting them to fixed points, handing out blocks, and fencing off the play area (Video, Education, and a Generation's Medium). On January 19, 2016, Mojang announced it was buying MinecraftEdu from the company; the product went off sale on April 5 the same year (Video, Education, and a Generation's Medium).

2.5Re-Logic

The developer of Terraria: a two-dimensional mining, building, and combat game released on Steam on May 16, 2011, with sales above 70 million copies as of May 2026. The main edition repeatedly quotes what its team members told The Guardian: "Minecraft is no longer a game, it's a genre" (Competition, Imitation, and Industry Influence).

2.6Anego Studios

The developer of Vintage Story, founded by Tyron and Irena Madlener; development began on April 5, 2016, public sales started on September 27, and the game has long remained in early access. The main edition lists it as a member of the lineage: it turns every abstract step of Minecraft-style survival back into concrete processes — prospecting starts with reading the geology, smelting iron means building your own kiln, food rots, and the seasons and climate genuinely turn (Competition, Imitation, and Industry Influence).

2.7Luanti / Minetest community

A free, open-source voxel game engine, started in October 2010 by the Finnish programmer Perttu Ahola (online name celeron55). The official distribution ships with no default game; all content comes from community-maintained subgames and mods. On October 13, 2024, the rename to Luanti was announced (the name joins Lua with the Finnish luonti, "creation"), in part out of exactly the worry that new players would mistake it for a Minecraft clone (Competition, Imitation, and Industry Influence). The main edition treats it as the completed answer to "rewriting the engine itself" and as the extreme sample of "redevelopability itself becoming the product" (What Exactly Are We Rewriting).

2.8Hypixel Studios

A game studio formed around the Hypixel server community, acquired in full by Riot Games in 2020; its game Hytale began development in 2015 and was shown publicly in December 2018. It shut down on June 23, 2025, when Hytale's development was cancelled; in November of the same year the IP was bought back from Riot by Simon Collins-Laflamme (The Server Is the New Game, Competition, Imitation, and Industry Influence).

2.9SpongePowered

The team behind the Sponge server platform, a project begun around 2014. It produced Mixin — self-described as "a mixin and bytecode-weaving framework based on ASM" — which hooks into the runtime's class-loading process and weaves community code into official classes; the main edition records Mixin as the key tool of the "injection as API" route (Mod and Plugin Architecture).

2.10Overwolf / CurseForge

CurseForge is the largest distribution platform for Minecraft mods, having opened its Minecraft section in mid-2011; in June 2020 it passed from Twitch into Overwolf's hands. The platform runs an author-points system: each month's prize pool is converted into points by downloads and popularity and split among authors, with a separate arrangement paying signed projects a higher share (70%); as of March 2025, this one platform alone hosted more than 200,000 Minecraft mods (The Grey Economy, Mod and Plugin Architecture).

2.11The Strong museum

Full name The Strong National Museum of Play, operator of the World Video Game Hall of Fame. In 2020, Minecraft was inducted by the museum into the World Video Game Hall of Fame; the main edition takes this as the marker that Minecraft has earned a place in the established process of video game heritage (Minecraft as Cultural Heritage).

2.12Omniarchive

A community version-preservation project, started in September 2017 by HalfOfAKebab. A large number of early official versions from 2009 to 2011 were never fully preserved by the officials and lay scattered on old hard drives; by reaching out to the veteran players of the time, the project has recovered more than eighty once-lost versions. The main edition uses it to illustrate the structure of preservation responsibility: the officials' obligation is that people now can play, not that people from the past can come back (Minecraft as Cultural Heritage).

Entries on this page carry no individual footnotes; sources are consolidated in the general note¹.

注释

1. All facts on this page come from the main text and footnotes of the chapters cited; the primary original sources are minecraft.wiki and Wikipedia, retrieved 2026-09-18. ↩