Minecraft Made a Cool $33 Million

Minecraft was developed in 2009 by Markus "Notch" Persson, a Swedish programmer. It's a browser based 3D game with graphics on par with 1996, but that didn't stop it from becoming the underground hit throughout last year. It spread throughout the internet, garnering Persson's company around ten bucks a pop for each purchase. That's not much, but just today Minecraft's website reports 1837252 have purchased the game.

Markus talked about his success in this reddit thread.

"A lot. It all ends up in an account somewhere, and I try not to look at it. I get a normal salary these days for day to day stuff, but there's a big pile somewhere.

The game sold about 800,000 copies at 9.95 euro and then so far 1 million more at 14.95 euro. PayPal takes a cut, there are taxes, and such, but it's still a huge wad of money."

I've never actually played the game myself, but I've watched this guy demonstrate his ridiculous amazing awesome brilliant skills in constructing logic machines in the Minecraft world. The first video I saw a few months back. He demonstrated a simple Arithmetic Logic Unit. If I remember correctly, it could add or subtract a 16 bit binary number (and maybe XOR it also). In this video, he is demonstrating a CPU that he constructed. I'm a huge chip-geek so I found this fascinating. It should give you a bit more of a view into what's going on in any computer. He demonstrates calculating the Fibonacci sequence.

[via GigaOM]