Minecraft Creator Shows Off Early Gaming Projects

Tom Goldman

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Aug 17, 2009
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Minecraft Creator Shows Off Early Gaming Projects

Markus "Notch" Persson has revealed over a dozen screenshots from games he worked on before Minecraft.

Markus "Notch" Persson had been creating videogames long before stepping into the limelight with Minecraft. In a recent blog post, he links to 13 screenshots of early projects that helped him gain the skills to put together one of the most popular indie games in the world.

Before naming his current company Mojang, Persson developed games under the name BitSeven Productions. All of the work shown here was programmed using the Turbo Pascal integrated development environment. The projects span game genres from across the board.

[gallery=161]

One of the titles was a "Megaman-type game" called Howl that starred a robotic coyote. Persson says he spent a lot of time perfecting the shells that got ejected from the coyote's gun.

Another was a JRPG-style game called Rubylands. Players would have wandered around and fought baby chickens, if it ever were released. The Rubylands name was later transferred to Rubylands X, a roguelike with exploding barrels.

Other projects include a side-scrolling space shooter, a top-down action game, a real-time strategy game, and more. They're worth looking at if you want to know how Persson learned to be a game designer. The screenshots along with their captions can be found here [http://imgur.com/a/B5WkP].

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Wolf Devastator

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Nov 12, 2008
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I saw these from his Twitter and some of them are pretty impressive. He's delved into a lot of different aspects of games and it's pretty awesome that he allowed us to see some of the progress that led to the creation of his big hit.
 

Art Axiv

Cultural Code-Switcher
Dec 25, 2008
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Shows everyone started somewhere and every thing you do can be forged into a success, if not now then later on! :)

Motivating!
 

FungiGamer

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Apr 23, 2008
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The one game screen actually looks like it was taken directly out of Chip's Challenge with the green door outline and pink ball enemies and all...
 

DazBurger

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May 22, 2009
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Scrumpmonkey said:
DazBurger said:
Sooo... Copies of old games?
He should have taken the job at Valve...
Harr Harr Harr. No. : |

Learning to build game enviroments take a hell of a lot of time, effort and experimentation. These show he has been putting his ideas down on paper in a range of genres using quick and realtively easy tools. He's using the genre veins of the late 16 bit era as a jumping off point. These are one man experimental projects and im not usre you could fault him for all 13 of them not being original masterpeices.

Of course im sure the dozens of games you have developed are much better.
Yes! Of course they are!


But still... I wasn't expecting all 13 of them to be original, but I was hoping to see at least ONE original.. ONE new idea.. Perhaps I was setting my expectations too high :/
 

draythefingerless

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Jul 10, 2010
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DazBurger said:
Scrumpmonkey said:
DazBurger said:
Sooo... Copies of old games?
He should have taken the job at Valve...
Harr Harr Harr. No. : |

Learning to build game enviroments take a hell of a lot of time, effort and experimentation. These show he has been putting his ideas down on paper in a range of genres using quick and realtively easy tools. He's using the genre veins of the late 16 bit era as a jumping off point. These are one man experimental projects and im not usre you could fault him for all 13 of them not being original masterpeices.

Of course im sure the dozens of games you have developed are much better.
Yes! Of course they are!


But still... I wasn't expecting all 13 of them to be original, but I was hoping to see at least ONE original.. ONE new idea.. Perhaps I was setting my expectations too high :/
No such thing as new ideas.
 

Meatspinner

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Feb 4, 2011
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draythefingerless said:
DazBurger said:
Scrumpmonkey said:
DazBurger said:
Sooo... Copies of old games?
He should have taken the job at Valve...
Harr Harr Harr. No. : |

Learning to build game enviroments take a hell of a lot of time, effort and experimentation. These show he has been putting his ideas down on paper in a range of genres using quick and realtively easy tools. He's using the genre veins of the late 16 bit era as a jumping off point. These are one man experimental projects and im not usre you could fault him for all 13 of them not being original masterpeices.

Of course im sure the dozens of games you have developed are much better.
Yes! Of course they are!


But still... I wasn't expecting all 13 of them to be original, but I was hoping to see at least ONE original.. ONE new idea.. Perhaps I was setting my expectations too high :/
No such thing as new ideas.
That really depends on how broad you definition of original is.

OT: Looking at these screens is like looking at an illustrated thought process that lead to Minecraft
 
Sep 30, 2010
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HankMan said:
I actually thought #3 was a city skyline at night until I saw the blown-up version. Disappoint
Same here
Nice to see his early work though, pretty interesting to see what he was before minecraft.
 

Tsaba

reconnoiter
Oct 6, 2009
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Are those Chocobo's?

Seriously has come a long ways, congrats to him.
 

blankedboy

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Feb 7, 2009
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Anyone notice how ISOM looks a hell of a lot like Minecraft? I swear that's the same grass texture.
 

qwertyz

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Mar 19, 2011
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That dungeon crawl game seems pretty interesting, wish he has something like that still up and running.