Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

I liberate the ending to Minecraft from Microsoft and give it to you

theeggandtherock.substack.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

301–310 of 778 posts

Re: I liberate the ending to Minecraft from Microsoft and give it to you

#301

Post by Moru »

blackoil wrote: post #191
Moru wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mojang was not a tiny indie company though, it already sold millions of copies before the release. Yes, he should have let his agent negotiate the contract. Do what you are good at and let others do what they are good at.

Size of Mojang is immaterial. If Apple or Microsoft hire a copywriter they'll still pay market rate. Any reason to believe the Author would have received bigger value with help of agent in 2010?

He would not have worried about it for so long, so yes I believe he would have help from his agent. I'm not talking about getting more dollars, he is buying peace of mind for his art.

Re: I liberate the ending to Minecraft from Microsoft and give it to you

#302

Post by wickedsight »

cmeacham98 wrote: post #183
pgsandstrom wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Im honestly chocked that people react so negatively to this piece. Yes, the author expresses many negative and self centered emotions. He is very clear about that. It is part of the story. It is a story about being a flawed person. I sympathize with him. I loved this piece. I hope he truly did let go of all the hangups he described. And it does seem that he actually did sell the the rights of use to microsoft, making…

My biggest problem with the post is the massive ego the author seems to have about the impact and importance of their writing. To be frank, the author made little to no meaningful contributions to Minecraft's success. The author is so self-centered they belittle the contributions of other Mojang employees and seem to genuinely believe their contribution is on the same level as people like Jeb and C418. They literally…

> the author made little to no meaningful contributions to Minecraft's success

Any success exists because of the sum of its parts. I have never played Minecraft, but I've played Portal. The ending to Portal was emotional, it was the cherry on top of a great game. That song and the emotion that came with it is still ingrained in me and is part of why I still recommend Portal to people who haven't played it.

Would I have played the game without the song? Probably. Would it have made the same impact without it? I don't think so. Emotion is a large part of why people play games, so that poem might actually have an impact.

Does that mean he deserved more? I don't know, €20k seems reasonable. But I think you underestimate the impact something like a poem can have.

Re: I liberate the ending to Minecraft from Microsoft and give it to you

#303

Post by whywhywhywhy »

theharrychen wrote: post #285

Wow a lot of HN commenters are so cynical of the writer and very quick to discount the value of the End poem.

It’s hard to ascribe value to it when you know the whole ending was rushed in as Notch walked out the door and the brief for the poem was literally just something long and nonsensical that appears out of nowhere and doesn’t mean anything.

Like it’s not a good ending to Minecraft, the game was maybe better off not having an ending.

Re: I liberate the ending to Minecraft from Microsoft and give it to you

#304

Post by Gatsky »

wikfwikf wrote: post #252
Gatsky wrote: post #202

Well I enjoyed the piece. But it evinces a kind of derangement unique to modern life. Minecraft became so popular, and worth so much money, that the author couldn’t get over it. Another example is that guy who threw away a hard drive with his bitcoin wallet on it, now worth $200 million or something like that. He can’t move on. Last I heard he was trying to finance a plan to exhume an acre of landfill and sort throug…

An even better example is the Australian guy who was Bitcoin-adjacent in the early days, and has now convinced himself, apparently, that he created Bitcoin. He has spent years making both resentful accusations and meaningless grandiose gestures (for example, that he was going to give billions from his secret wallet 0 to pay for STEM education in Africa).

Yes, also a good example, although he seems more delusional than merely deranged.

Re: I liberate the ending to Minecraft from Microsoft and give it to you

#305

Post by wnkrshm »

wikfwikf wrote: post #246
dewhelmed wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, what an unpleasant hate-filled response to a single paragraph taken out of context from the entire post. The fact that his work is still referenced, is still part of the game, and wanted by people on t-shirts/mugs/etc is significantly more contribution than the moronic made-up "0.000000000001%" number you claim. He is a flawed person and he admits it several times in his post. But he also uses his story to highl…

The fact that t-shirts and mugs are available on RedBubble does not prove that anyone wants to buy them. The business model of RedBubble means that merch can be created speculatively for no cost to anyone until it's actually bought.

People are tattooing it on themselves though, that's something that isn't usually offered on etsy or redbubble as an online order?

Re: I liberate the ending to Minecraft from Microsoft and give it to you

#306

Post by cobertos »

lelanthran wrote: post #220
cobertos wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He mentions that there were only five people actually on the actual dev team _at launch_? Notch, C418 (music), Jeb (only coder at launch), Kristoffer Zetterstrand (ingame paintings), and him (ending). He said only 25 people were staff at the time as well. I am truly curious who they were and what their roles were.

> He mentions that there were only five people actually on the actual dev team _at launch_? How would he know? From his own account, he was nothing more than a contract supplier who supplied one single thing. He claims that they were friends, but his own account of the whole mess shows that that isn't true.

It _does not_ seem like a stretch for him to know this. I've done work for a small agency and got to know most people there. The owner, head of art, billing, and other coders. I built 1 large website for them. We had enough communication where I came to understand how the org worked, and became more than acquaintances with the people I didn't know prior.

Re: I liberate the ending to Minecraft from Microsoft and give it to you

#307

Post by erklik »

operator-name wrote: post #170

This has also been posted to the Minecraft subreddit, where is has received a lot of positive attention from the community: https://www.reddit.com/r/Minecraft/comments/zf8ye0/i_wrote_t...

> I am just a flawed guy, not particularly together, who doesn't have next month's rent.

This comment by him.. seems to be honestly something that explains quite a bit as to where he's coming from.

Re: I liberate the ending to Minecraft from Microsoft and give it to you

#308

Post by rcxdude »

wickedsight wrote: post #302
cmeacham98 wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My biggest problem with the post is the massive ego the author seems to have about the impact and importance of their writing. To be frank, the author made little to no meaningful contributions to Minecraft's success. The author is so self-centered they belittle the contributions of other Mojang employees and seem to genuinely believe their contribution is on the same level as people like Jeb and C418. They literally…

> the author made little to no meaningful contributions to Minecraft's success Any success exists because of the sum of its parts. I have never played Minecraft, but I've played Portal. The ending to Portal was emotional, it was the cherry on top of a great game. That song and the emotion that came with it is still ingrained in me and is part of why I still recommend Portal to people who haven't played it. Would I ha…

Eh, the ending to Minecraft was very much an afterthought. A huge number of players have never even attempted it. And the poem at the end is... frequently skipped, even on the first go-around. It's nowhere near the level of the ending to Portal.

Re: I liberate the ending to Minecraft from Microsoft and give it to you

#309

Post by Kiro »

mort96 wrote: post #295
Kiro wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It absolutely reads as if his contribution is significant enough that he should be be considered one of the creators. > giving money to back-office staff who had just arrived in the last year, and had zero creative input into the game [...] I had helped him create the actual game The way he puts down regular employees, making it sound like his poem is obviously more important than whatever a mere employee does.

Yes, he considers himself "one of the creators of Minecraft". Because he is one of the creators of Minecraft; he created a part of the game. He doesn't consider himself "the creator of Minecraft", as you claimed. You can think he puts down regular employees and makes himself seem more important than is warranted. You may think his contribution is tiny compared to the contribution of people who marketed the game or ma…

"The creator" and "one of the creators" are not mutually exclusive. Both can be true.

> Steve Jobs is the founder of Apple Inc., along with Steve Wozniak and Ronald Wayne.

Anyway, I changed the comment to "one of the creators".

Re: I liberate the ending to Minecraft from Microsoft and give it to you

#310

Post by [deleted] »

cmeacham98 wrote: post #165
operator-name wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think your focus on the financials, which was a very small part of the article is misguided. I'm under the assumption that the article is part of the author trying to "piece things together" - as a part 2 of his spiritual journey where he concluded: > I wrote a story for a friend, but in the end, he didn't treat me like a friend, and I'm hurt. By accepting this premise, these are examples of when he expected to be…

But he was an outsider, he wasn't Notch's friend. Notch contacted him for the express purpose of writing the End Poem. Of course, I'm sure they were friend ly in their discussions, there's no point in being actively hostile to the people you're working with. But the idea the relationship extended anything past a game developer and a contracted writer seems to be entirely in the author's mind.

[deleted]
Post reply on HN