Back in 2014, when Minecraft was acquired by Microsoft for a record sum of $2.5 billion, the original creator of the game, Markus Persson, known also as Notch, left the company. Based on some recent reports, it seems that Microsoft has decided to remove any mentions of him from the popular game, due to some controversial statements that Persson made about homosexuality.
Over the last couple of years, Microsoft has continued to improve the game and grow it as a family-friendly brand. The company has also developed an interactive Minecraft: Story Mode and Minecraft: Education Edition for schools.
The references to Notch in Minecraft are gone
Even though Notch wasn’t part of the game’s development for a couple of years now, this doesn’t change the fact that he is still one of the creators of Minecraft. Nevertheless, it looks like he might have become history. A new report mentions that the game’s wiki lists shows how the texts “Made by Notch”, “The Work of Notch” and also “110813” (which refers to the date Notch got married) have been removed from Minecraft. This can be seen in the 27th of March snapshot.
According to Polygon, this is the second largest set of phrases that have ever been taken away from the game. So far, only nine other splash text phrases have been removed from Minecraft.
What’s the exact reason why Microsoft has removed the references?
At the present time, no one actually knows why Microsoft has decided to remove the references to Notch. Whether this is related to the recent controversial comments that Notch has made or not, we don’t know yet. We hope to find out more about this soon.
There are some people who believe that this could simply be just an error. But for now we’ll just need to wait and see what follows next.
Juana loves to cover the tech and gaming industry, she always stays on the first row of CES conference and reports live from there.
