Minecraft is as much a cultural phenomenon as it is a video game, drawing millions of children and parents into its strangely addictive, retro-stylized open world since its release in 2011. The game has made its creator, Swedish programmer and designer Markus “Notch” Persson, a very rich man. It was reported in April that 15 million copies of the game have been sold, which would bring Mojang, Persson’s game studio, about $375 million in revenue. That’s enough money to spend $46,300 on a rare test pressing of a long-forgotten Richard D. James — better known as Aphex Twin — album, as Persson did last week.
So I kinda paid a lot for a double LP from the ’90s..
— Markus Persson (@notch) June 23, 2014
That Persson was the one to buy the record was first pointed out by the A.V. Club early yesterday morning, and bolstered by some digital sleuthing via a bulletin board operated by the person who sold the record.
“My daughter was blown away that the guy who made the game she endlessly plays bought a record off her dad for 46K,” Joyrex, the seller, wrote on We Are The Music Makers site, the same online community behind the recent and very successful Kickstarter which brought a novel approach to distributing the music. “The label and Richard James himself agreed to offer one-time distribution rights,” James E. Thomas wrote on the Kickstarter page, “so the people contributing to this Kickstarter would have a once-in-a-lifetime to own tracks from arguably one of the rarest electronic music (non) releases of all time (and some damn fine music too).”
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The crowdfunding effort had only one support level, for $16, that would earn each contributor a digital copy of the record. It ended up raising over $67,000, a third of which is headed to a charitable cause.
Once the Kickstarter’s goals — to digitally encode the vinyl record and distribute it to the fans that had funded the project — had been met, the vinyl was then listed on eBay. 100 bids later and the creator of one of the most successful video games of the last five years was its new owner.
Judging by Persson’s self-created bio page on Mojang’s website, it would seem the work is in good hands; at the bottom, he writes: “I like ‘Fight Club’ (the movie was better than the book, though), ‘A Song of Ice and Fire’ and Aphex Twin.”
