Notch, "Happy birthday, us!", 16 October 2011

Cite as: Notch, "Happy birthday, us!", 16 October 2011
Original: https://notch.tumblr.com/post/11518566613/happy-birthday-us
sha256: 854309279f772592ad6d16890ca3b4f1208c211ce07e5ddaf9d3314119a8e671
Archived: https://web.archive.org/web/20120331020147/https://notch.tumblr.com/post/11518566613/happy-birthday-us
Accessed: 2026-10-26
Licence: © Markus Persson; Wayback capture
Credit: Markus Persson's post of 16 October 2011, Mojang's first birthday.
Notes: Gives the game's start and the prototype's pitch in his words ('Dwarf Fortress meets Rollercoaster Tycoon meets Dungeon Keeper'), plus the sales position a year after Mojang's founding: 'almost four million copies sold'. This is the developer's own compact origin account, alongside the 2009 origins post.

Cited on

Persson wrote in October 2011 that he started on Minecraft in the summer of 2009 with a top-down isometric mining game pitched as "Dwarf Fortress meets Rollercoaster Tycoon meets Dungeon Keeper", then played Infiniminer, saw that a first-person view with blocky graphics worked well, and began prototyping that.	`second paragraphsecond paragraph`	Dev blog
Persson wrote on 16 October 2011 that Mojang had been founded a year before, when Minecraft had sold between half a million and one million copies, and that it had now sold almost four million.	`first paragraph`	Dev blog