Notch Profiled in Rolling Stone

You know, demographically, I’m going to bet you guys are too young to remember, but it used to be that getting featured in Rolling Stone magazine was a big deal. There was even a song about it. Agh, I’m old. Now get off my lawn and I’ll tell you the rest.

Anyway, the reason was that a Rolling Stone interview went deeper than your average quicky web interview, and boy does this one ever. You get a taste of Markus Persson, or Notch’s, concert-throwing, Borderlands 2 playing instead of working, affluent lifestyle, but also a sense that it sits uncomfortably on his shoulders. You also get deep dark secrets about his dad, and how his dad’s substance abuse and suicide influenced Notch.

The family moved to Stockholm when Persson was seven. When he was about 12, his parents divorced, and his father moved to a cabin in the countryside. In the years that followed, his father suffered from depression. “My dad went to jail for bad stuff – robberies, break-ins – because he got stuck in substance abuse,” Persson says. “We had a really shaky period.”

And more heartbreakingly:

On December 14th, 2011, his father committed suicide. “He got really drunk and apparently had a handgun,” Persson says quietly. “It was shocking. It took me a while to even realize it was real.

“I didn’t break down until I had to view his body at the funeral,” says Persson. “Everyone asked me, ‘Do you want some alone time?’ Probably because they realized I hadn’t been reacting much. They left and I just crumbled.

“It doesn’t hurt as much anymore,” he continues, but occasionally he worries that the dark clouds that engulfed his father also follow him around. “The depression, I’m worried about. With the creative stuff, I have highs of being very productive and lows of being not productive. I have that in my moods as well.”

Plus there’s some stuff about the history of Minecraft in there as well:

It was during Persson’s off-hours at an online-photo-album company called jAlbum that he began working on Minecraft. He wrote the original version of the game alone in his Stockholm apartment in 2009; it took him about a week. The simple, blocky graphics were a result of Persson’s impatience getting the game finished. “I just wanted to make a game that could make enough money to make another game,” he says.

Anyway, the full article is here. Get to reading.

Images from DualShockers and Planet Minecraft