Original Minecraft creator Markus “Notch” Persson has stated on Twitter that his next game will be a Minecraft spiritual successor and that he “basically announced minecraft 2.” Notch had run a Twitter poll asking followers to weigh in on whether he should keep his in-development project’s current direction, or put it on the shelf to make something more like Minecraft.
Notch’s in-development project was a roguelike spin on classic first person dungeon crawlers like Wizardry, Grimrock, or Eye of the Beholder. On New Year’s Day, Notch put out a poll asking followers whether he should keep going in that direction, or switch gears. “I gots to thinking that maybe there are people who like my work but do not share my taste in retro nostalgia and would prefer for me to make a spiritual successor thing to Minecraft,” he wrote. “And I mean sure, I’d take that cash.”
At the time of writing, “make minecraft 2 boomer” is leading “i love uncursing potions” by a commanding 78% to 22% with four days to go. In follow up tweets, Notch insisted that he was “100% serious about all that, btw,” and that he “basically announced minecraft 2.” He further stated that, “I also intend to do this in a way that in no way tried [sic] to sneakily infringe on the incredible work the Mojang team is doing and that Microsoft is successfully doing the microsoft shittification about.
“And I respect them for doing that. It’s their job. And they, from what I understand, let the studio do things their way, which seems very fair to me.”
Notch sold Mojang to Microsoft in 2014 for $2.5 billion, parting ways with the game and the company. In the years since, his reputation as a game developer has been eclipsed by one as a right wing partisan, making bizarre, insensitive, and often cruel or derogatory statements directed primarily at women and trans people. Microsoft and Mojang removed his name from the opening credits of Minecraft in response. Some Notch’s statements in the past 10 years include:
Taking a step back from that and just calling balls and strikes here, I do not believe “basically announcing minecraft 2” on Twitter is the best move, especially once any initial buzz dies down. I don’t know the details of Notch’s deal with Microsoft, but equating a project to a Minecraft sequel while also disparaging Microsoft in what is essentially early marketing strikes me as a contractual no-no, a one way ticket to cease and desist-ville.
I also don’t know what kind of appetite there is for a Minecraft spiritual successor beyond Notch’s own active Twitter following—a necessarily self-selecting group given his pariah status in much of the industry. There are so many games embodied by Minecraft, is this a spiritual successor to Minecraft the survival experience, Minecraft the creative sandbox, or Minecraft the proto-Roblox modding and social platform? “Minecraft 2” can be all of these things when it’s just an idea you’re throwing out on Twitter, but whatever Notch has in mind will wind up being more limited than a game that has been slowly built up over the course of 16 years.
And there are a ton of other Minecraft spiritual successors already out there and established to compete with: Terraria and Dragon Quest Builders are the closest examples, but depending on how strict your definition is, the entire tree punching, base building survival genre could count. The roguelike dungeon crawler honestly strikes me as a much more interesting game, and it’s a surprisingly under-explored concept in the saturated roguelike space. But also: What’s the point of taking a $2.5 billion buyout if you’re just going to shelve your questionably profitable passion project for what the crowd says it wants?