The creator of Minecraft, Markus “Notch” Persson, has announced today that he will be stepping down as lead developer of the game that has become an indie phenomena, handing the reigns over to Mojang co-worker Jens Bergensten.
With the game having finally reached full release last month after two years of development, Persson has decided to move on and work on a new Mojang project. Before the full release, the game was in an open beta and saw millions of registered users and purchasers creating their own block-filled worlds.
“[It’s a] scary move, but I feel strangely confident,” said Persson. “I guess we’ve worked close enough for long enough for me to feel confident about it.”
Though he had reservations about handing over Minecraft, as the game is his “baby”, Persson admitted that Bergensten was the right man for the job.
“He’s exactly what Minecraft needs right now,” he said. “He’s a bit more mod friendly than I am, and we need to embrace mods more.”
Bergensten admitted that this wasn’t something Persson had suddenly decided, a the transition was something that has been in the making 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 stated. “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.'”
The new man behind Minecraft‘s first order of business will be to work on the mod API for the game. He admitted that he will be the only one at Mojang doing so until January, and due to that he expects the API to release “no sooner than March.”
“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.” said Bergensten. “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.”
As for Persson, he is looking to release material on his new project soon, which he considers will be “probably one week after I do a prototype that looks fun, if I know myself.”
“It kinda depends,” he continued. “We have some stuff in the pipeline that I might work on. But what I really want to do is to do something new.”
Markus done a great job I am big fan don’t change alot in the game itself v1.2.5 is great I wish the best to mojang thnx