Shadowing Practice: How Minecraft Was Made - Learn English Speaking with Video
Creating lesson...
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- On a normal evening in 2009, a man gets home from work and boots up his computer.
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His name is Markus Persson, but he often goes by his screen name, Notch.
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Based in Stockholm, Sweden, Persson spends his evenings developing passion projects, fun coding exercises that sometimes end up as completed video games, but more typically become abandoned after a short time.
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But what he doesn't know is that the file he starts today will change the gaming industry forever and will make him one of the wealthiest suites in the world.
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This is the making of "Minecraft." In the very beginning, the game that Persson was creating wasn't called "Minecraft." It was called "RubyDung," based on the two main elements of the game, the Ruby Lands and the Dungeons.
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- "It's going to be a fantasy group manager.
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You don't actually do any quests yourself, but rather assemble, equip and level up heroes, and send among quests you've gotten them the local town." - Persson created a texture atlas, which is essentially one large image file that contains lots of smaller textures.
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Initially, this atlas only contained two textures, grass and cobblestone.
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Using these elements, he created a digital landscape filled with trees.
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Next up, Persson wanted to implement a first person view of the heroes going on their quests, but quickly he realized that it was becoming too pixelated and blurry.
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Frustrated that he couldn't get all of the features just quite right, Persson scrapped the idea, not realizing that he had just created the first prototype for what would later become "Minecraft." One major limitation was that he could only work on his games during the limited free time after his day job.
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He worked as a programmer at Midas Player, the Swedish game developers that would later go on to create "Candy Crush." However, his bosses at Midas Player were unsupportive of Persson's hobby, and once they discovered that he was making his own games in his free time, they felt that there was a competing interest and they barred him from continuing making his own games.
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But Persson couldn't be stopped.
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Rather than comply, he decided to quit his job in order to continue working on his own passion projects, and he found a new job with the software company jAlbum, where he befriended the CEO Carl Manneh.
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JAlbum was not a game studio, but a company that made digital photo album software.
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And Carl Manneh not only didn't mind what Persson did in his free time, but instead he actively encouraged him to continue designing games.
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At this point, RubyDung still sat on the shelf, a scrap project with little more development.
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That is until April, 2009 when Persson came across a new game that would change everything for him.
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The game was called "Infiniminer." "Infiniminer" is a multiplayer game where players team up against other players to dig blocks in search of minerals.
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As blocks are dug up, they can then be used to create structures to impede other teams.
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Though the objective of the game was to mine up more minerals than your opponents, players quickly abandoned that goal and instead realized it was much more fun to just build things.
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But despite the game's enormous potential, its development was plagued with difficulties.
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Zachary Barth, the original creator of "Infiniminer," had intended to create a large network of players, but with the game's code constantly being modified and rewritten, the game soon fragmented its user base as the different versions of the game weren't compatible with each other.
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Frustrated, Barth decided to abandon the project as a whole and the game's code became open source.
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The first time Persson tried "Infiniminer," he immediately had an epiphany that this was the game he wanted to do, and he had lots of ideas of how he could make it better.
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He sat back down with the previously abandoned "RubyDung" and got to work tweaking it into the new vision he had in his head.
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Reusing his existing textures, Persson took a full weekend to rework some of the coding and art style.
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He called his creation "Cave Game" and with just a little more work, it moved from just a test to a working prototype.
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Now all he needed were players and he had a plan for where he could get some early testers.
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Just a few weeks prior, Persson joined an online indie game forum called TIGSource.
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Here, developers can receive feedback from other developers on games they are creating.
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Persson began discussing with others in the community who quickly suggested a new name for the project, "Minecraft: Order of the Stone," named for the two actions you could do in the game, mining and crafting.
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Though Persson would later drop the subtitle from the name.
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He then decided that this forum would be the best place to start getting early players and have some immediate feedback for how he could continue developing the game.
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And so on May 17th, 2009, he shared the first link that would allow others in the forum to begin play testing the game.
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- In "Minecraft," it's an alpha version, so there might be some crashes.
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- Just 12 minutes after he posted the link, the first person provides feedback.
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- "Oh hell, that's pretty cool.
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I just dig around on the ground a bit and suddenly I'm in this underground cave.
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Great sense of exploration already." - Just three minutes later, the next reply.
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- "The animations are fantastic.
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It's generally really derivative at the moment of 'Infiniminer.'" - Quickly, more and more people are downloading, providing feedback and above all, praise.
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And though the forum was made for feedback, players couldn't resist posting the things they have made.
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And since people were showing off screenshots of their creations, more and more people were encouraged to jump in and give it a try themselves.
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The community also had plenty of feedback for features that could make "Minecraft" even better, and Persson was on it, updating his blog nearly every day with the progress he was making on adding many of the ideas presented.
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- "I plan on having several game modes, creative, survival, team survival, a fortress." - Though players were consistently finding the gameplay addicting in this early stage, there was no way to save what they had built.
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There was also no way to play with friends or to play on maps that others had created.
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Persson would often sit down with the intention to add these commonly requested elements to "Minecraft," but he would repeatedly get distracted due to the challenges of implementing multiplayer and instead would focus on more fun features.
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- "Okay, multiplayer was boring, but here's water.
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Should 'Minecraft' have blood?
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No, blood is overused." - Next up was adding multiplayer, which would take quite some time.
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But Persson was determined to get it up and running, though not without some more side projects along the way and more challenges to overcome.
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- "So I didn't do multiplayer code, but I had fun.
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Multiplayer will be in the form of a downloadable server, which will broadcast its IP to the main server when it starts up.
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Ugh, I feel stupid.
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Server admins could host any data they want on their servers.
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This means anything, including bad things.
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Multiplayer's starting to go good.
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I've got player connect/disconnect going and map streaming on login." - With the release of multiplayer, nearly a month had passed of constant updates, fine-tuning and debugging since "Minecraft" was first introduced to the TIGSource community.
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And Persson realized that his passion project could be much more than just a game he was making as a hobby.
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If it was going to continue to grow like this, it was time to put a price tag on it and go commercial.
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Though today, it may seem completely normal that an indie developer sells their game rather than releasing it for free, this wasn't actually the case in the late 2000s.
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The expected practice rather, was to release a game as freeware and to make money through the use of ads.
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Persson, however, came up with a different plan.
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Having seen how valuable the direct feedback from the forum has been, he designed his pricing to reward early adopters.
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And despite the warning that people wouldn't pay for such a game, sales started coming in almost immediately.
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Persson even started seeing such a high influx in his income that his PayPal account was frozen due to suspected fraud.
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It was also enough that he was able to change his status from full-time to part-time at jAlbum, allowing him to spend even more time on developing "Minecraft." Month after month, Persson followed the same process, listening to feedback from those who were playing, implementing more features that were commonly requested and fixing any bugs that were reported.
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He also during this time met another person on the TIGSource forum that could help him with the game's sound design.
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Daniel Rosenfeld is a musician and sound engineer, and he began to collaborate with Persson to provide sound effects for "Minecraft" as well as produce the iconic soundtrack that is still used to this day.
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By 2010, sales of "Minecraft" had grown to the point where Persson was able to quit his part-time job with jAlbum altogether.
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And it was clear that as "Minecraft" continued to expand, Persson would need an actual business structure to handle the explosive growth.
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But since he was uninterested in actually running a business, he decided to call in some help.
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First was a friend and colleague from Persson's old days at Midas Player, Jakob Porser.
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Second was yet another colleague, but this time from jAlbum, the former CEO Carl Manneh.
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Together, the three would establish the company that would officially back "Minecraft," Mojang.
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Persson was no longer working from home, but had built a small team.
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The game was still not officially finished, but it already became immensely popular amongst players.
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And by August of 2010, Minecraft had grown enough to catch the attention of other much larger game developing companies, such as Valve.
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Persson was invited for meeting to the headquarters of the gaming giant in Bellevue, Washington, and he accepted the meeting halfway across the world.
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And while there, Persson thought he could also meet some "Minecraft" fans.
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- "I have all day on August 31st free in Bellevue if you guys could organize something on the forums, and I figured we could call it MinecraftCon 2010, even if it's just three people sitting around in uncomfortable silence for 20 minutes." - During the meeting with Valve, the company offered Persson a position.
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However, he decided to turn the offer down as his focus was solely on Minecraft.
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After these negotiations, however, Persson joined a small gathering of people that had come around because of his blog post.
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A little more than 50 people turned up to hang out in a park, a meetup that would go down as the very first MinecraftCon, and this spontaneous event would give the Mojang team an idea.
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By the end of 2010, "Minecraft" had reached over 700,000 sales, and yet by this point, "Minecraft" was still technically not a finished game.
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It was still in its beta phase, but Mojang's development team was close to finishing the actual release.
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With so much hype already built around the game, Mojang knew they needed some fanfare to go along with the game's launch.
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And in November, 2011, they decided to host an official MineCon.
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This time, instead of an impromptu gathering of 50 people, it would be a sold out organized event with 4,500 attendees.
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And in quintessential early 2010s fashion, this Minecraft convention had a party DJ'd by Deadmau5.
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All of this would be leading up to the grand finale of MineCon 2011, the official release of the game.
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As the Mojang team gathered on stage, Persson would stand by a large blocky lever, and with one pull, "Minecraft" was officially launched as a finished project.
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Even though the game was now finished, the team would continue working on it, releasing updates, and adding new features even until today.
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But for a Persson himself, it was the end of a chapter.
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After two years of continuous work on "Minecraft," he was ready to move on to other projects in order to get back to what he loved doing most, coding.
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And so just two weeks after "Minecraft"'s official release, Persson decided to step down from his position as lead developer of "Minecraft." With Jens Bergensten now at its helm, "Minecraft" continued to flourish, but Persson didn't get the rest he was hoping for.
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Still perceived as the maker of "Minecraft," players continued to send any issues they encountered to him, and he was flooded by complaints.
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For a long time, he would attempt to ignore the negative feedback that he could do nothing about until it finally came to a head in 2014.
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As the popularity of "Minecraft" continued exploding, an inevitable feature from players began to emerge, pay to win.
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Mojang has always allowed public servers to be created so that players around the world can play the same map together.
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However, this opened a door for some to take advantage and create servers where players have to spend money to gain an advantage.
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These pay to win services violated the end user license agreement of "Minecraft," which is why in a controversial move, Mojang began to crack down on these servers and gave them a deadline to either adapt or to shut down.
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Following this statement by Mojang, there was immense negative feedback.
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And though Persson was no longer working on "Minecraft," he still received the bulk of the criticism.
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In frustration, he sent out a tweet on June 17th, 2014, that would change the direction of Mojang forever.
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- "Anyone want to buy my share of Mojang so I can move on with my life?
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Getting hate for trying to do the right thing is not my gig." - The very next day, Manneh began fielding calls from companies that wanted to know if Persson was serious, including studio giants EA, Activision and Microsoft.
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And after giving it a thought, Persson realized he actually was serious about selling Mojang so that he could finally distance himself completely.
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And after several rounds of negotiations, a deal was struck.
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- Mojang has confirmed it's being sold to Microsoft for $2.5 billion.
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- The deal with Microsoft meant that the Mojang founders Persson, Manneh, and Porser would step away completely, whereas all of their employees would be barred from layoffs.
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The Microsoft deal was worth a staggering $2.5 billion.
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And as the major shareholder of Mojang, Persson had become a billionaire overnight.
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This is the part of the script that should have been the easiest to write.
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After all, it's a classic happy ending.
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Persson had achieved the unthinkable.
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He turned his passion project started at home into an empire, becoming wealthier than he ever imagined.
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In the following years, Persson would continue developing games and he would do what billionaires do, moving to Los Angeles and buying the most expensive mansion ever built in Beverly Hills, hosting extravagant parties.
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Meanwhile, "Minecraft" continues to thrive.
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With over 300 million sales, it is to this day the most sold video game ever made.
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But yet, this is the part of the script for this video that was by far the hardest to write.
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In 2017, a series of racist and homophobic tweets led to Microsoft distancing itself from Persson.
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They scrubbed his name from the game and did not invite him to the 10th anniversary celebration of "Minecraft." Persson's tweets were bad, really bad, and they have significantly impacted his legacy in recent years.
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For me, the hard part about writing this section is figuring out how to talk about someone's harmful comments without making things worse.
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In situations like this, it often feels like there are two paths someone can take.
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The easy path is the one where they double down on their harmful views, find a crowd that supports them.
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But then there is the hard path, acknowledging the mistakes, learning from them, and making an effort to change.
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And the easier we make it for people to take this second path, the more might take it.
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Markus Persson's story is undeniably inspiring.
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There are few stories that highlight as well as this how powerful a good idea is and how much creativity can flourish within constraints as his.
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And more than anything, he has created a world that I've always experienced as incredibly inclusive.
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When is "Minecraft" the most fun?
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Is it when you open a new world, starting to build something new from scratch?
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Or is it when you've built an empire and when you have an abundance of everything there is?
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Markus Persson is now in that second stage of life.
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When I first started this channel, I never could have imagined it would lead to making videos like this.
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I got to hire an actor, build out a set, and even rent a sound stage in order to make this story come to life.
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And over the course of the last years, I have produced my most ambitious productions yet.
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My video series called Under Exposure, each episode a unique gripping story that I believe deserves to be highlighted.
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The series name Under Exposure is intentional.
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An underexposed image is a photograph that captures too few details in the shadows.
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But in my series, we will bring these shadowy aspects to life to find out what really happened on the top floor of the Bin Laden compound, why flight MH17 crashed over Eastern Ukraine.
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Or look at the remarkable story of how two families escaped a dictatorship using only a self-made hot air balloon.
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This entire series is available exclusively on Nebula, which is a creator-owned streaming service where the likes of Johnny Harris, Wendover Productions, or Real Life Lore post their videos early ad-free and create higher budget originals, such as my original series.
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So go to nebula.tv/neo and make sure that you use exactly this link in order to get 40% off the annual plan.
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All my exclusive videos are up there, so thanks for the support and thank you so much for watching this video.
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Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson
This video has 147 sentences and 3043 words to shadow. The speech runs for 22:00. The speaker talks at a steady 138 words per minute, a comfortable pace for shadowing. Only 80% of the words are among the 3,000 most common in English, so the vocabulary is demanding.
Key vocabulary in this video
15 less common words from the video, with pronunciation and meaning:
- feedback /ˈfiːdˌbæk/ (noun) — Critical assessment of a process or activity or of their results.
- server /ˈsɝvɚ/ (noun) — A program that provides services to other programs or devices, either in the same computer or over a computer network.
- forum /ˈfɔːɹəm/ (noun) — A place for discussion.
- multiplayer /ˌmʌl.tiˈpleɪ.əɹ/ (adjective) — Requiring or allowing multiple (or more than the usual two) players to play simultaneously.
- developer /dɪˈvɛləpɚ/ (noun) — A person or entity engaged in the creation or improvement of certain classes of products.
- passion /ˈpæʃən/ (noun) — A true desire sustained or prolonged.
- abandon /əˈbæn.dən/ (verb) — To give up or relinquish control of, to surrender or to give oneself over, or to yield to one's emotions.
- gather /ˈɡæðɚ/ (verb) — To collect normally separate things.
- implement /ˈɪmpləmənt/ (verb) — To bring about; to put into practice; to carry out.
- tweet /ˈtwiːt/ (noun) — The sound of a bird; any short high-pitched sound or whistle.
- encourage /ɪnˈkʌɹ.ɪd͡ʒ/ (verb) — To mentally support; to motivate, give courage, hope or spirit.
- commonly /ˈkɑmənli/ (adverb) — As a rule; frequently; usually.
- survival /sɚˈvaɪ.vəl/ (noun) — The fact or act of surviving; continued existence or life.
- script /skɹɪpt/ (noun) — A writing; a written document.
- creator /kɹiːˈeɪ̯təː/ (noun) — Something or someone which creates or makes something.
Phrasal verbs you will hear
- work on (verb) — To apply mental or physical effort to (something) in order to shape, form, improve, investigate, solve it, etc.
- do in (verb) — To kill or end; to defeat.
- build out (verb) — To develop or expand (a system, structure, project, etc.).
- call in (verb) — To communicate with a base etc, by telephone.
- come across (verb) — To change sides; to cross over to work for the opposition.
- come around /kʌ.məˈɹaʊnd/ (verb) — To change one's mind, especially to begin to agree or appreciate what one was reluctant to accept at first.
- come in /ˌkʌm ˈɪn/ (verb) — To enter.
- come up with (verb) — To manage to produce, deliver, or present (something) by inventing, creating, thinking of, or obtaining it.
Pronunciation to watch
The speaker uses 18 contractions and reduced forms, such as couldn't, didn't, I've. Say them the short way, as you hear them.
- The “th” sounds: gather /ˈɡæðɚ/, altogether /ɔl.tuˈɡɛð.ɚ/, thrive /θɹajv/
- The “sh” and “zh” sounds: passion /ˈpæʃən/, negotiation /nɪˌɡəʊ.ʃiˈeɪ.ʃən/, flourish /ˈflʊ̈ɹ.ɪʃ/, establish /ɪˈstæb.lɪʃ/, shadow /ˈʃædəʊ̯/
- Long words — get the stress right: multiplayer /ˌmʌl.tiˈpleɪ.əɹ/, developer /dɪˈvɛləpɚ/, negotiation /nɪˌɡəʊ.ʃiˈeɪ.ʃən/, essentially /ɪˈsɛnʃəli/, incredibly /ɪŋˈkɹɛdɪbli/
How to practise with this video
- Listen to the whole video once without speaking and note the words you do not know.
- Shadow it sentence by sentence at normal speed, repeating each one until your rhythm matches the speaker.
- Record yourself and compare with the original, paying attention to words like feedback, server, forum.
Grammar in this video
The structures the speaker uses most, with the exact words from the video:
| Structure | In the video |
|---|---|
| Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it | wasn't called · be stopped · was called |
| Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now | you've gotten · have made · has been |
| Relative clauses who / which + clause — extra information about a person or thing | atlas, which is · server, which will · those who were |
What is the Shadowing Technique?
Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.