The upcoming 10th Minecraft anniversary celebration won’t be featuring the game’s creator Markus “Notch” Persson. Notch has previously attracted controversy in recent months due to comments he made on Twitter. These comments likely led to several splash screen references related to him being removed from the game. Now it seems that Notch is also being excluded from the games upcoming 10-year-anniversary celebrations that are to take place at a press event in Stockholm, Sweden.
“His comments and opinions do not reflect those of Microsoft or Mojang and are not representative of ‘Minecraft,” a Microsoft spokesperson said to Variety. The Microsoft spokesman also iterated that Mr. Persson had not been involved in the game’s development since he sold Mojang to Microsoft in 2014 for the substantial sum of $2.5 billion. Notch subsequently used a share of the money he earned from the sale to outbid Beyoncé and Jay-Z on a $70 million Beverly Hills mansion.
Notch has spent the better part of the last five years working on personal projects and participating in social media. While his personal game development projects have attracted a measure of attention, it is his controversial Twitter posts that have ultimately seen him excluded from the Minecraft anniversary celebrations.
Among his more controversial claims is his statement that the QAnon Conspiracy Theory is “legit,” although he later walked back the comments somewhat by indicating that the importance lies in the conspiracy theory getting people to look critically at world events.
Whether or not you agree with Notch’s statements to his millions of Twitter followers, it clear that Microsoft has taken issue with the controversy that he has attracted. While Notch won’t be included in the Minecraft anniversary celebrations, the event itself is sure to be an interesting celebration of a game that’s on every platform short of smart fridges. Minecraft’s original release date was May 17, 2019, so it won’t be long before we see what kind of cool stuff Microsoft and Mojang have in store.
