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Comment by democracy | Hacker News Reader

Don't quit that easily! I remember reading about the minecraft dev here on HN ~10 years ago when paypal froze his account with 20M. It was the first time I heard about the game so I checked it out and thought it was complete crap and probably a scam if he really had 20 million from selling this junk of a game )))

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Notch's story is bittersweet to me.

He ended up bowing out from the game and largely retreating from the tech space entirely. Lotta reasons for that; but mainly -- as a wildly successful entrepreneur he suddenly found himself to be a highly influential figure whose every casual statement caused news article to get written[0] and he DID NOT WANT THAT AT ALL.

True, he made a ridiculous amount of money, but I don't know if it was worth giving up his creativity.

[0]: https://xkcd.com/799/

> True, he made a ridiculous amount of money, but I don't know if it was worth giving up his creativity.

Well, you could always just open a new GitHub account under a new name. Perhaps he's done that.

If the casual statements were "I like cheese" or "tabs are better than spaces" that would not have been newsworthy. "Feminism is a disease" and "Q is legit" are rather more controversial statements.

I don't want to apologize for those statements -- its clear that they were wrong. However, I do think that originally they were genuinely a result of a mental breakdown.

As for the "Q is legit" statement, he quit Minecraft before Q was a twinkle in 4chan's eye. I don't follow Notch and haven't for years. I'm not surprised a lonely tech enthusiast was ensnared by the Q cult, though.

He retreated from the public eye and started throwing huge parties for twenty something music and movie starts in Hollywood in the mansion he outbid Beyoncé and Jay-Z for. The mansion comes complete with a Candy Room [0]

[0]: https://www.businessinsider.com/minecraft-creators-new-mansi...

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