Minecraft may not be under Markus “Notch” Persson’s wing anymore after selling it to Microsoft and Mojang, but he is still credited on the game’s splash screen. Well, he was. After some digging, people discovered that a new update has removed Notch’s handle from the splash screen from some versions of the game.
Twitter user decrepitlab noticed the removal earlier today. On the wiki page for the Java version, it lists that it has “removed splashes referencing Notch” including the “Made by Notch!”,”The Work of Notch!”, and “110813!” from the splash screen. The number is a reference to when Notch married his ex-wife Elin Zetterstrand on August 13, 2011. The two divorced around a year later. There has been no word on when or if this will affect other platforms.
Notch didn’t have much to say on the matter. When prompted by one tweet with a picture about the removal saying that the “evil is defeated,” he responded, “it sure is.”
Microsoft or Mojang have been more quiet on the issue. Until an official response is given, it’s not possible to know for sure why this happened.
However, it could possibly be due to Notch’s controversial tweets as they have often placed him in hot water. In July 2017, he tweeted his support of “heterosexual pride day” but ended up walking back the statements after criticism poured in.
But that was one of the few times he has been apologetic. He tweeted in November 2017 that it was “ok to be white” and then said that privilege was a “made up metric to silence and repress.” Then in March 2019, he tweeted his support of QAnon, a group that specializes in extreme, false, and baseless far-right conspiracy theories.
He’s also tweeted that there is “an agenda against white men.” And while the base tweet has been deleted, when prompted if he “loves jews,” he responded by saying that “if we were allowed to discuss IQ differences between populations, there’d be fewer conspiracy theories.”
