notch

Notch is the pseudonym of Markus Alexej Persson, a Swedish video game programmer and designer best known as the creator of Minecraft and founder of Mojang Studios.

Born June 1, 1979, in Stockholm, Sweden, Persson began programming as a teenager and worked on several game projects before co-founding Mojang with Carl Manneh in 2009. Minecraft started as a personal project and was released in an early alpha for PC in May 2009, eventually reaching full release in 2011. The game’s growth helped establish Mojang as a prominent indie development studio and turned Minecraft into a global phenomenon.

Mojang was acquired by Microsoft in 2014 for about $2.5 billion, and Persson left the company soon afterward, stepping away from ongoing development of Minecraft. In the years that followed, he pursued private projects and occasionally attracted media attention for controversial statements on social media, which led him to distance himself from Minecraft and Mojang’s ongoing work.

Notch remains a widely recognized figure in gaming culture due to Minecraft’s enduring popularity, though the ongoing development of the game has continued under Mojang and subsequently under Microsoft’s ownership. The Notch persona is often cited in discussions of indie game success and the early days of modern sandbox games.

Notch can also refer to the common English noun notch, meaning a V-shaped indentation or groove in a surface used to mark measurements or conditions. In technology, the term has been used to describe display cutouts at the top of screens and other indented features.