Update January 8th 8:15AM: Notch has announced that he and his team are working on his roguelike dungeon crawler idea, which is tentatively called Levers and Chests.
Despite the Minecraft spiritual successor clearly winning the poll Notch released, he says the "tipping point" for deciding to make the roguelike was PC Gamer calling the concept "interesting". Guess you're out of luck if you wanted Minecraft 2. Original story follows below.
Original story: Markus "Notch" Persson, the original creator of Minecraft, says he's "basically announced Minecraft 2" after releasing a poll in which he asked his fans what type of game they'd like to see him work on next.
The poll, which was posted on social media platform X a few days ago, gave fans two options with regards to Notch's next project: "a traditional roguelike" in the vein of ADOM or Nethack, or "a spiritual successor thing to Minecraft".
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the poll, which has attracted over 285,000 votes at time of writing, heavily skews towards "Minecraft 2", as he calls it, with 81.5% of votes weighing in for that project and just 18.5% of votes supporting the roguelike concept.
In a followup message posted later on, Notch then says he "basically announced Minecraft 2" in the poll. Despite feeling that "spiritual successors are usually kind of...tragic", he goes on to say "why not do the thing that people DO want and are willing to give me, somehow, even MORE cash for".
Of course, Notch doesn't actually own the rights to Minecraft anymore (which he himself acknowledges); since Mojang was purchased by Microsoft in 2014, at which point Notch also left the company, it's Microsoft that owns Minecraft, not Notch.
In his post, Notch says he intends to make the Minecraft spiritual successor without "sneakily infring[ing] on the incredible work the Mojang team is doing and that Microsoft is successfully doing the Microsoft shittification about". He doesn't elaborate on exactly what that means.
It's worth noting that Notch doesn't reveal any details whatsoever about this project, so it's likely that we're a long way away from seeing any actual gameplay or even learning any concrete information about it.
Notch also doesn't sound particularly enthusiastic about making Minecraft 2; he's open about knowing it'll make more money than his roguelike idea, but he implored his supporters to vote for his roguelike project, so that's likely where his heart is (or was).
While the concept of Minecraft's original creator making a spiritual successor will be exciting to many, he's not a figure without his fair share of controversy.
He's been accused of homophobia, transphobia, misogyny, and other prejudices due to his posts on social media, leading to Mojang excluding him from Minecraft's tenth anniversary due to his "comments and opinions".
As for Minecraft itself, it's going from strength to strength.
It's still the best-selling game of all time, having hit 300 million sales back in 2023, and a number of tie-in projects are in the works, including real-life attractions, an animated series on Netflix, and a live-action movie. As far as we're aware, Mojang and Microsoft have no plans for a Minecraft 2 of their own.
