Markus Persson, the visionary developer behind one of the most popular independent games of all time Minecraft, has stopped working on his newest creation 0x10c.
This newest game, a space game Persson describes as being “about actually being in character in space rather than playing as a space ship like you do in most space games.” The game had a lot of reported exciting features, like an in-game computer that could infect other players with viruses and could be programmed. Understandably due to Minecraft’s insane success (Mojang reported £57m profit in 2012), there has been a lot of interest in the independent community about this game.
Notch cites the pressure of the community in his blog post addressing the subject, but he doesn’t blame their interest. Instead, he says “It was quite ambition, but I was fairly sure I could pull it off. And besides, if I failed, so what?…What I hadn’t considered was that a lot more people cared about my games now.”
For Perrson it seems that a great deal of the fun was taken out of the project by having to manage the expectations of others. The joy of developing was greater when he was working on a small project no one knew anything about.
While the news will be disappointing to some excited fans, there is a community crafted version of 0x10c called Project Trillek you can read more about that here.
And gaming hasn’t lost anything. Persson isn’t giving up the torch. In closing, he writes; “I want to do smaller games that can fail. I want to experiment and develop and think and tinker and tweak. So that’s what I’m going to do.”
You can read more about Notch’s announcement in its entirety here.
