Read Minecraft: The Unlikely Tale of Markus "Notch" Persson and the Game that Changed Everything for Free Online

of CD or DVD disks and then ship them to stores throughout the world. The five largest game publishers—Nintendo, Sony, Microsoft, Activision Blizzard, and Electronic Arts—accounted for about 70 percent of the turnover in the industry in 2008.
    The enormous budgets and gruesome deadlines that mark large productions engender predictability and standardization. That doesn’t necessarily mean bad quality. For example, Battlefield 3 has been praised as one of the most impressive games of 2011. There is, however, less room to test new ideas. For a nonplayer, there is very little that separates Battlefield 1942 —the first edition of DICE’s series, released in 2002—from the latest version. Huge productions tend, like giant Hollywood films, to build upon proven concepts that appeal to as large an audience as possible. Sports games, which can be updated each year to reflect the latest season’s player lineups, are among the most profitable in the business and are produced assembly-line style by the big publishers.
    From the point of view of publishers, experimental game concepts are risky. Why try something different when another Battlefield with better graphics and even more impressive explosions is almost guaranteed to sell at least as well as its predecessor? New ideas mean untested ground and therefore greater risk that the investment won’t pay off. Only a fraction of the thousands of game productions that are initiated each year ever reach the top of the sales-ranking lists. Though it’s the publishers taking the economic risk, the resulting failure or success is most felt at the development level. New opportunities materialize for the studios that succeed, then more money from the publisher and greater freedom to determine the tone of the next project. For those who fail, one single wrong turn can mean disaster.
    That was something that brothers Bo and Ulf Andersson learned firsthand in the summer of 2008. They were two guys from Huddinge, outside of Stockholm, whose names were on the lips of everyone in the gaming industry. In just a couple of years, they had taken the game studio Grin from being a small newcomer to one of Sweden’s most talked about. The company worked on several large games, among them a hyped-up new interpretation of the eighties classic Bionic Commando (commissioned by Japanese Capcom), and a game based on the movie Wanted (to be published by French game company Ubisoft). Grin’s breakthrough came in 2006, with the war game Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter . The game was hailed by the critics, became a retail success, and was celebrated with expensive champagne at the corporate office. Some of the gaming world’s absolute top people had their eyes on Grin and flew to Stockholm to listen to the Andersson brothers’ visions of the future.
    A few years later, there were rumors in the business that Square Enix itself, one of Japan’s most esteemed video game publishers, had hired Grin for a high-stakes prestige project. The Andersson brothers had been given the task of developing the next installment of the iconic gaming series Final Fantasy . It was a huge deal. Japanese publishers seldom use Western game studios for their most important titles. Being asked to work on the next sequel of Japan’s most famous video game series was, for a relatively unproven Swedish developer like Grin, comparable to two newly graduated architects from Sweden being asked to redesign the Sydney Opera House. Grin expanded swiftly and hired new people. By the end of 2008, the company had nearly three hundred employees and offices in far-off places like Barcelona and Jakarta.
    Then things took a turn for the worse. Neither Bionic Commando nor Wanted received the warm welcome that Grin had expected, right when the financial crisis made game-players think twice before opening their wallets. Sales were so-so. Not a disaster, but not good enough for Grin to count on making back the enormous amounts of money they had