Markus “Notch” Persson has revealed over a dozen screenshots from games he worked on before Minecraft.
Markus “Notch” Persson had been creating videogames long before stepping into the limelight with Minecraft. In a recent blog post, he links to 13 screenshots of early projects that helped him gain the skills to put together one of the most popular indie games in the world.
Before naming his current company Mojang, Persson developed games under the name BitSeven Productions. All of the work shown here was programmed using the Turbo Pascal integrated development environment. The projects span game genres from across the board.
One of the titles was a “Megaman-type game” called Howl that starred a robotic coyote. Persson says he spent a lot of time perfecting the shells that got ejected from the coyote’s gun.
Another was a JRPG-style game called Rubylands. Players would have wandered around and fought baby chickens, if it ever were released. The Rubylands name was later transferred to Rubylands X, a roguelike with exploding barrels.
Other projects include a side-scrolling space shooter, a top-down action game, a real-time strategy game, and more. They’re worth looking at if you want to know how Persson learned to be a game designer. The screenshots along with their captions can be found here.
