Like a zombie shambling into the light, it seemed to come out of nowhere. Then, before you knew it, it was the game everyone was talking about. "Have you played Minecraft?" people would ask. And then I did, and I understood. Beneath its blocky visuals lies an astoundingly deep experience. You explore, collect, and build, and then when night falls, you hope you don't die. It's the type of game that really needs to be experienced before you can fully understand it. Ars spoke with developer Markus "Notch" Persson about where the game actually came from and what we can expect next.

Like many independent developers, Persson started his career working as a full-time developer, in this case working on Flash games for over four years. But during that time he also worked on a number of projects on the side, including the MMO Wurm Online, which was created alongside Rolf Jansson and released back in 2006. "As the company I was working on grew larger, my working on games during my free time became a bigger problem, so I decided to leave that job and see if I couldn't make a game on my own," he told Ars. "So I started working on Minecraft in June 2009."

The game that would eventually become Minecraft actually stemmed from a combination of two rather seemingly disparate influences.

"The original idea was to make a game similar to Dwarf Fortress in tone, but with a Rollercoaster Tycoon type interface," Persson explained. "As I was playing around with a first person mode I stumbled upon a game called Infiniminer that used low-res textures in a 3D environment, and I realized that that was a perfect fit for both my artistic skills and the type of game I wanted to make.

"Right from the start, the vision for Minecraft was very similar to where Minecraft alpha is now, but I focused on just getting the engine written and making sure that the controls felt smooth. People really liked the early versions of the game that didn't have any gameplay at all, so I decided to keep that around, calling it "creative mode.'"

That creative mode is essentially a virtual sandbox, allowing players to explore and build however they want. But the recent alpha version of the game features a more structured experience, and one that has captured the imagination of the gaming community. The survival mode forces players to utilize their time wisely: building up a defense during the day so that they can withstand an onslaught of monsters during the night. It's every zombie fan's dream come true and even inspired a series of Penny Arcade strips.

"The response has been overwhelming!" Persson told Ars. "I kind of started to suspect that the game had some potential early this year, but lately it's really gotten quite insane. Seeing the game get mentioned on Penny Arcade was a huge honor, but it actually felt like a bigger thing when VGCats featured it."

The success of the game is especially impressive when you consider that Minecraft isn't even in its final version yet. Persson and his team still have a lot of plans to expand the world of Minecraft, as well as improving the business side of things for the budding development studio Mojang Specifications.

"I'm working on hiring some people to help with development and business, getting an office, and all that," he told Ars. "Then my focus is to finish up survival mode multiplayer, with working enemies and health and better cheat prevention tools for server admins. Once that is done, the game will be in beta, and there will be lots of polishing and tweaks to get the game ready for the final version. After the final version, we will keep working on the game.

"There are a lot of things that could be added to this game, and we'd like to try to add as many of those as we can."