What? A prominent person losing touch with reality and their company because they are bigots? Hi Papa John’s founder and CEO John Schnatter! You now have more company!
Marcus “Notch” Persson sold the Minecraft to Microsoft in 2014 for a small sum of $2.5 billion. The current Minecraft owners have been starting the process of removing all traces of Notch from the game.
The main menu of “Minecraft” has a splash text function which used to display various messages referencing the creator of the game. Messages which referenced its creator, such as “Made by Notch!” or “The Work of Notch!” have now been removed from the game. – Variety.com
Not only is Notch now missing from the game, he has been left off the guest list for the 10-year anniversary party for the game to be held on May 17th in Stockholm, Sweden. Persson hasn’t been involved with Minecraft since he received the bundle of 2.5 billion bucks for his creation and it looks like that will be continuing, not by his choice.
But to be shunned from your baby’s 10th birthday? What did he do?
It is mainly because of his “comments and opinions,” Microsoft told Variety.
“His comments and opinions do not reflect those of Microsoft or Mojang and are not representative of Minecraft.
Persson has increasingly used his Twitter account with 3.7 million followers to share some not so wonderful opinions, including transphobic statements, comments about “heterosexual pride day,” and “it’s ok to be white.”
Here’s an older text, but still hateful …
But the recent strand of negative Nancy comments coming from his Twitter account were against people that supported transgender women…
So did Microsoft take a lesson from Facebook and its recent removal of not so supportive people (Facebook Cracks Down on Milo, Alex and Other “Dangerous” Individuals)? The update to the game that removed Notch from loading screen actually occurred last month so maybe Facebook took a lesson from Microsoft?
Microsoft has confirmed that Persson would not be present at the Stockholm Minecraft studio on May 17th. Even though the event will look at the “past, present, and exciting future of the decade-old franchise,” there’ll be a notch missing on that timeline.
With more than 91 million monthly players of his creation, his $2.5 billion prize, 3.7 million Twitter followers, and the game being the second best-selling video game in history behind Tetris, Marcus “Notch” Perrson will be a hard one to fully erase.
Source: Variety.com