Minecraft’s original creator Markus ‘Notch’ Persson has seemingly announced that he intends to make a spiritual successor to the best-selling video game of all time in the oddest way possible.
A few days ago on social media, Notch asked followers if he should continue making the “traditional roguelike” with “tile-based first-person” dungeon crawling that’s currently in development, or whether he should ditch that to instead create a “spiritual successor thing to Minecraft” via a poll. Right now, that poll obviously skews heavily toward the Minecraft 2 option with 77% of the votes.
In a follow-up tweet that’s since been deleted, but reposted elsewhere on the internet, Notch doubled down. “I basically announced Minecraft 2,” he wrote. “I thought that maybe people actually do want me to make another game that’s super similar to the first one, and I’m loving working on games again.” He also acknowledged that most spiritual successors “are usually kind of… you know… washed up. Tragic. The things I’m fearing my next game is going to be anyway and try to push myself to avoid.”
Of course, he can’t actually call it Minecraft 2 since he sold the game’s rights and Mojang Studios to Microsoft for $2.5 billion a decade ago, effectively making Notch a billionaire. “I also intend to do this in a way that in no way [tries] to sneakily infringe on the incredible work the Mojang team is doing and that Microsoft is successfully doing.”
It should be noted that Notch hasn’t released a proper game since his departure from the series 10 years ago, despite opening another studio to do just that, so there’s a very big chance this “Minecraft 2” never comes to be. It’s also worth noting that Notch’s name was removed from Minecraft for inflammatory political statements he made as far back as 2016, which included calling for a straight pride month, supporting potentially the dumbest conspiracy theory of all time in QAnon, and making generally transphobic comments.
Who needs Minecraft 2 when you can just play the 25 best games that are like Minecraft?
