Minecraft Creator Shows Off Early Gaming Projects

[Tom Goldman]

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.

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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]

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.

 

[RA92]

I'm really digging the old-school feel...

 

[Art Axiv]

Shows everyone started somewhere and every thing you do can be forged into a success, if not now then later on!

Motivating!

 

[FungiGamer]

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...

 

[Not G. Ivingname]

As Steve Jobs once said, "Overnight successes often took awhile."

 

[MrGalactus]

Well...you gotta kiss a few frogs.

 

[DazBurger]

Sooo... Copies of old games?
He should have taken the job at Valve...

 

[DazBurger]

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]

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]

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

 

[Mushroom Wobbit]

i wish i could make anything as good as those
must keep studying...

 

[itsausernamewhatofit]

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]

Are those Chocobo's?

Seriously has come a long ways, congrats to him.

 

[blankedboy]

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

 

[qwertyz]

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

 

[viciouspen]

It's funny that I don't see a screenshot from Wurm Online, the mmo that Notch worked on for ages.
Which before you go, save yourself the the pain, it is the absolute most painful gouge your eyes out thing you will ever play (not entirely Notch's responsibility though seeing as many of those things seemed to be more from the other developers). Keep playing Minecraft, trust me, it's far better and more fun.

I have reservations in regards to Notch. My first experiences with him were from Wurm, and he was not the nice guy that made Minecraft, he was a guy that would berate his own players, make fun of them in inappropriate ways, go on epic tirades if people asked the simplest question, and in one time I'll never forget go on a long diatribe explaining how all players were nothing but "wallets" to him, we weren't people, we didn't matter, just give him our money and flip off cause a game's community was a laughable insignificant thing. Then after a particularly inflammatory tantrum, entire sections of the forums would be deleted to cover it up.

This has made the phenomena of Minecraft a very different experience for me than understandably a lot of other people.
It's nice to see that he seems to have changed after getting away from that project, but I'm still rather wary in regards to him and his creations because of that. Guess I'm wary of seeing the Notch I met again.

 

[MasterSplinter]

"Turbo Pascal" Holy crap?!
Every person y have ever met that knew about programing have said to me that Pascal is a useless coding language, except maybe for learning purposes.

That's not to say i agree or disagree with them, i know shit about programing, but it surprised me to see it used "nowadays" and for games.

 

[DazBurger]

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.

Oh yes, there is always new ideas to be made.

 

[drakythe]

"Turbo Pascal" Holy crap?!
Every person y have ever met that knew about programing have said to me that Pascal is a useless coding language, except maybe for learning purposes.

That's not to say i agree or disagree with them, i know shit about programing, but it surprised me to see it used "nowadays" and for games.

these are all old projects. Lots of years old, so he was using it to learn.

snip

I'm just gonna be really glad we all have an opportunity to grow up. The me on the internet from 10 years ago was not a friendly person *shudder*