Mojang Studios’ controversial ending Minecraft caused a lot of conversation over the years. A poem scrolls across the screen after the player defeats the Ender Dragon for nine minutes. Quotes from “The End Poem,” the name of the swan song, were written on fans’ skins and turned into merchandise. But the story behind the prose is tantalizing in itself.
in one Long Twitter threadIrish writer Julian Gough recounts the encounter Minecraft the creator, Markus Persson 11 years ago and wrote the epilogue to the adventure game, MinecraftThe poem ends. Gough said he was pressured to sign with Mojang Studios and then Microsoft after the company acquired the studio in 2014, after the epilogue had already been implemented in the game. The contract would sign Gough’s rights to Mojang and later parent company Microsoft. According to Gough, he never signed Mojang when writing the game’s epilogue, meaning he owns the copyright to the poem, not the corporation. In the thread, Gough uploaded a photo of the contract Microsoft allegedly sent that Gough refused to sign in 2011 and 2014.
“I’m lucky I’m not interested in working in the video game industry, so I can just tell the truth and whatever happens, happens,” Gough said. Kotaku. “Video games are a wonderful art form, potentially the greatest art form, but the industry as a whole often doesn’t treat writers with respect or understanding, and therefore, they often do not achieve the best results. It’s tragic, because the best writers can really elevate the whole game, on every level.”
After taking the shroom in the Netherlands, Gough decided to get Minecraft Poem End is in the public domain through a Creative Commons license, according to his own narration of the story, which he shared on Substack in December 2022. Gough said he booked MinecraftThe end of the ‘public domain’ is so players are free to do whatever they like with it, whether it’s using the poem in a school play, making t-shirts and posters about it, or Paint it on the side of the truck.
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“But there’s no point giving people a present if they don’t KNOW they’ve been given it. So I wrote a long piece on Substack, telling the story,” Gough wrote in the Twitter thread. “It went mildly viral. A terrific editor at a major global media organisation read the piece, and got in touch.”
When the undisclosed media organization reached out to Microsoft, Gough says the company refused to reply. According to the writer, Microsoft’s silence was the company’s way of circumventing the Streisand Effect. Instead of making the news big just to make the news a bigger story, the article was scrapped.
“Va no action. Silence works. Lawyers at the media organization, understandably but annoyingly, lost their cool,” Gough wrote. ‘no comment’, it’s impossible to know what Microsoft knew or intended to do. And that’s too much of a risk for the media organization’s lawyers, because Microsoft [has] 1700 lawyers and unlimited financial firepower.”
Kotaku Contacted Microsoft for comment but received no response.
If Gough’s ending was for “some tiny independent company with no legal department,” he said coverage of his closing poem, he wouldn’t have faced the level of pressure. such obsessive reality check and scrutiny of lawyers.
“If they said or did anything, we could have reacted. If they object well, we can change a few lines and publish,” Gough wrote. “If they protest vehemently, we can show them proof that we are right and publish.”
Gough said Kotaku It’s interesting to see his Twitter thread gain support from fellow writers and people in the video game industry.
“I even received a PayPal donation from a Microsoft employee! It was a pleasant surprise,” Gough said. “And I have received a number of eye-opening direct messages from writers and other creators who feel they have been duped by the big game companies, but are afraid to say anything. in public, because they are worried that they will be quietly blacklisted. There’s a lot of hurt out there.”
At the end of his thread, Gough encourages players to read and share the original Minecraft ending of the game, which can be seen in the YouTube video below.
