The Word of Notch has a new post celebrating the first anniversary of the formation of Mojang. Included is a little history lesson on how
Minecraft came to be the game familiar to almost four million paying customers:
I started working on Minecraft in the summer of 2009, starting with a top-down isometric mining game. The elevator pitch for the game was “Dwarf Fortress meets Rollercoaster Tycoon meets Dungeon Keeper”. It was an interesting game for sure that I’d still like to see someone make, but then I played a game called Infiniminer and realized the first person perspective with blocky graphics worked really well and started prototyping it. The game went from being about controlling a team of characters to being a single player first person experience, with a focus on resource gathering and a somewhat coherent fantasy setting that would provide hopefully constant challenges and things to do.