[treflop]

They shouldn’t have. Not everyone needs fit an example.

Let’s take Markus: before he made Minecraft, he made relatively mediocre games that didn’t get much traction. Minecraft was an exact copy of someone else’s game (Infiniminer) that was posted on the same forum that he went to. He saw potential when its original creator did not (the creator of Infiniminer got angry that people extended his game so he shut it down). Minecraft blew up. The games that Markus made after Minecraft? Relatively mediocre again.

So what can you learn from the example of Markus? Nothing. Nothing at all. Sometimes you just get lucky.

[rsanek]

sometimes you do just get lucky. but you can only get lucky if you're actually doing stuff (not just learning about it)

[kamaal]

If I do X I will get lucky != Lucky people can do X and win.

Simply put the act of doing something doesn't make you lucky. However if you are lucky already, you can do most things and win.

[ItsMonkk]

What do people on here say, luck favors the prepared? Had he gone on to college, the odds that he was on that forum go down, and thus he would not be the one strike when the opportunity arose.

Confirmation bias is very tricky here. A quick look at top essentially single games of all times shows that a full 50% or so of them were created by drop outs, a number way outside of what we would expect. But how many dropped out and failed?

All of these guys clearly had the capability to create greatness within them their entire life, but were stuck in an environment that did not fit their talents or did not otherwise give them the support that would allow them to thrive, like Tao got.

And yet, all of the people whom were failed by the system will never be heard of, and we have no idea the numbers of these people either. I expect that there are way more of them than unsuccessful dropouts.

[whywhywhywhy]

It wasn’t a copy of Infiniminer, despite the name that game wasn’t about infinity or really mining. It was more a team fps with blocks and a bit of digging in a small arena.

While yeah his early games are very weak seeing Infiniminer‘s engines potential as a survival game and creative game rather than a team fps deserves credit.