The controversial end of Mojang Studios Minecraft sparked a lot of conversations over the years. After players defeat the Ender Dragon for a whopping nine minutes, a poem will play on screen. Quotes from the “End Poem,” as the swan song is titled, were painted onto fan skins and turned into merch. But the story behind the prose is compelling in itself.
in one Long twitter threadIrish writer Julian Gough told of a meeting Minecraft Creator Markus Persson 11 years ago and wrote the narrative ending for the adventure game, MinecraftThe End Poem. Gough said he was pressured into signing a deal with Mojang Studios and later Microsoft after the company bought the studio in 2014 after the ending was already implemented in the game. The deal would transfer Gough’s rights to Mojang and eventual parent company Microsoft. According to Gough, he was never signed to Mojang when he wrote the game’s ending, meaning he owned the copyright to the poem, not the company. In the thread Gough uploaded a photo of the contract allegedly sent by Microsoft that Gough refused to sign in 2011 and 2014.
“I’m lucky that I don’t give a shit about being in the video game industry, so I can just tell the truth and whatever happens, happens,” Gough said my city. “Video games are a great art form, possibly the greatest art form, but the industry as a whole often doesn’t treat authors with respect or understanding and as a result often doesn’t get the best out of them. It’s tragic, because the best writers can really improve the whole game, on every level.”
After taking shrooms in the Netherlands, Gough decided to take it Minecraft Poem End under public domain under a Creative Commons license, according to his own account of the story, which he shared on Substack in December 2022. Gough said he bet MinecraftThe end of ‘Public Domain’ was such that players could do whatever they wanted with it, be it use the poem in a school play, make t-shirts and posters out of it, or paint it on the side of a van.
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“But there’s no point in giving people a gift if they don’t KNOW they got it. So I wrote a long article about Substack and told the story,” Gough wrote in the Twitter thread. “It went slightly viral. An outstanding editor at a major global media company read the article and got in touch.”
When the unnamed media organization contacted Microsoft, Gough said the company declined to respond. According to the author, Microsoft’s silence was the company’s way of doing that Streisand Effect. Instead of making a big deal out of news just to make the news a bigger story, the article was scrapped.
“And it worked. Silence worked. The media organization’s lawyers understandably but annoyingly lost their nerve,” Gough wrote. “Without comment, even a ‘no comment,’ it was impossible to tell what Microsoft knew or planned And that was too much of a risk for the media organization’s lawyers, because Microsoft [has] 1700 lawyers and unlimited financial firepower.”
my city contacted Microsoft for comment but received no response.
Had Gough’s demise been for “a tiny little indie firm with no legal department,” he says as he broke news of his closing poem, he wouldn’t have faced such a high level of “scrutiny” and obsessive fact-checking from lawyers.
“If they had said or done something, we could have acted on it. If they had made a good objection we could have changed a few lines and published it,” Gough wrote. “If they had made a bad objection, we could have given them proof that we were right and published it.”
Gough tells my city It was interesting to see his Twitter thread getting support from other writers and people in the video game industry.
“I’ve even received PayPal donations from Microsoft employees! That was a pleasant surprise,” Gough said. “And I’ve received some eye-opening DMs from writers and other creatives who feel betrayed by major game companies but are afraid to speak out publicly for fear of being silently blacklisted. There are a lot of injuries out there.”
At the end of his thread, Gough encouraged players to read and share the original Minecraft End of the game that can be seen in the YouTube video below.
