What dollar amount makes a creator want to walk away from his own creation? For Markus Persson, known as Notch, it was $2.5 billion. This episode follows Minecraft from Persson's after-hours prototypes while working at King, the isometric base-building experiment RubyDung that he almost abandoned for looking too blocky, and the moment Infiniminer convinced him uniform cubes were a technical shortcut rather than a flaw.

It covers the May 2009 forum upload of Cave Game, the community-driven alpha and beta era, creepers that forced players to build shelters, redstone circuits that made the game capable of logic gates and in-game computers, C418's ambient music, procedural generation and the floating-point breakdown known as the Far Lands. The episode then turns to Persson stepping down as lead developer after the 1.0 release, the 2014 EULA fig ...