So writing is a good way to feel productive while avoiding actually being productive I’ve found. I should be programming. It’s late though, and my brain is wound up, and that combination tends to make writing functional code incredibly difficult, so I’m here instead.

I began learning to program around age 11 or 12 I think. There are two clear starting points that I can remember for this, and I’ve never worked out which one came earlier. One is that I came up with an *absolutely brilliant* (read: Reddit but literally designed so you couldn’t not argue) idea for a website and went to the library and got a book from 2000 on HTML. And then I thought I was set. (That book tried to teach me Perl, but that’s a rant for another day). The other is that for Christmas (probably around 2011) a relative gave me issue #24 of Make: Magazine. I didn’t learn much from it, but the next summer I saw a special summer issue of Make with a bunch of projects for kids in it, and bought it. There were some really cool things in it, and also a lot of references to Arduino, something I couldn’t work out how to pronounce. I looked it up and started watching a tutorial where someone was controlling a servo with a potentiometer, and I was hooked. I bought a starter kit online and then proceeded to do almost nothing with Arduinos for the next 5 years, but I was on the programming train now.

Whichever of these is truly my start in programming (I can’t work out the timeline in my head properly, but it seems to me like the HTML must have come first), from there I learned some C++ and then watched the lectures from Stanford’s CS106A with Mehran Sahami, and that was the first time I saw Java. As I covered last time, I don’t like Java much anymore, but it was the first language I ever really got into. I was making some kind of mining game in it, following a tutorial series showing how to make something like Minicraft – a Ludum Dare entry developed by the one and only Notch, sort of super light weight Minecraft (the importance of which has gotten to the point that it is now recognized as a word by my spell check, unlike Mehran Sahami’s name).

That’s the other main ingredient in this story: Minecraft. Again, I can’t make this timeline work out, but at some point around the other two events a friend of mine showed me Minecraft Pocket Edition, and I was amazed. This was around 2011 or 2012, so Minecraft was already a major thing, but I had never heard of it. I went home and started watching videos, then bought the game, and played it way too much for a couple of years.

Minecraft was huge for me mainly because of the culture around it. I probably spent more time watching videos of the game than playing it myself, and for good reason. The things other people have created with it are captivating. The most important effect the game had on me though was that it made me want to be a game developer. For a few years, that was what I planned to do after high school (the beginning of which was still years off for me at the time, thankfully). I got the movie Minecraft: The Story of Mojang and watched it several times over, and that just reinforced the dream in my mind of being a game developer. This looked like so much fun, starting or working for a company like this. A year or two passed, I got (marginally) better at programming, and still all I wanted was to work for a company like Mojang, or even better to work for Mojang. Being a part of this world was all that I could see, all that I wished for.

And then in September of 2014 Mojang was sold to Microsoft, and I was very confused. The whole point of this had seemed to me to be avoiding companies like that and staying small. That, and the founders were leaving. I had ended up idolizing these people, this company, this idea, and now I didn’t see why. My mind began to change. I began to realize that I didn’t want to spend my entire adult life sitting in front of a screen and programming. Programming was a hobby to me, something to do for fun, I didn’t want it to be my job. That, and the game industry I had wanted to work in would be 15 years gone by the time I was ready for it. The world that Minecraft began in in 2009, and where I had begun learning to program in 2011 was not the one I would enter after university, off in 2020-whatever. I wanted to live in a world in the future that was already gone.

So I changed my plan. I discovered the space industry and returned to engineering, the field I had wanted to go into since I was four. And now I’m nearly there, starting my engineering degree this fall. But for those few years, I had seen a different future. Every once in a while I go back and watch the videos that used to get me so excited, about Mojang and indie game development and programming, and I miss that. The idealism of it (there’s a weird thought, I had idealistic views about software development), just the pure ideas of it, had been what I wanted in my future. Sometimes I wonder if I had been born a decade earlier if I would be in that industry now? Today though, I had a different question. Where is Mojang these days?

I follow Notch on Twitter (always an… interesting experience) so I know roughly where he ended up post-Mojang. But what about the company itself? I know Minecraft is still getting regular updates (and at some point became the second-best selling game ever, after Tetris), so they’re clearly doing something. I checked their website, and its last update was two years ago. I began looking around and found out that Scrolls, the game Mojang had (in part at least) been founded to make, had its servers shut down a few weeks ago, and hasn’t been updated since 2015. Cobalt, the game they published for a smaller studio, is out and that’s about all there is to say about it. So what is Mojang doing?

From everything I can find, it seems like they might just be maintaining Minecraft full time now. That makes me… sad I think? Nostalgic at least, for the time when they seemed like the innovative, awesome future that I wanted to be part of. I’m not going to start blaming Microsoft for this, or anyone (I would like to assign blame for some of the things to come out of Minecraft, but that’s for another time). That’s just what happened. It still makes me sad though. Mojang had meant something to me, their future had especially, and now we’re in the future and they’ve disappeared from it.

There is no real moral to this story or anything. I just wrote it because… well… I don’t know. Almost no one reads these anyways, so it’s a good place to put my thoughts at times, when I’m not going on about not doing any work. I often end up thinking about how time passes and feeling nostalgic, probably a lot more than I should considering I’m only 17. I keep thinking of ways to end this essay, but none of them work. I want to say that I’m worried that by the time I can see the world it will have changed, but that’s a bit obvious. I was never going to work for Mojang, I’m a decade too young for that at least. This is getting rambly so I think I’ll just cut it off here and say oh well. For a few years I wanted to be a game developer, then I stopped, and now when I look back at those years I’m nostalgic for the future I saw, and a bit scared about what future I’m going to end up in now, without its rosy tint.