Minecraft Harvests Community

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In a move that isn’t entirely unexpected for Mojang, the company has expanded its Minecraft staff by four: Warren Loo, Erik Broes, Nathan Adams, and Nathan Gilbert have been brought on in the interests of “improving both the server and the client to offer better official support for larger servers and server modifications.” They’re also all former community members. Together, they developed “bukkit,” which was more or less a community-born version of what they’re now doing in an official capacity.

Hiring from the community is not an unheard of practice for developers whose titles welcome and enable such open and freeform modification. BioWare still uses its Neverwinter Nights Toolset as a means of evaluating job applicants and Valve’s Counterstrike franchise originally began as a Half-Life mod. It goes to show you that, if your interests lie in game design, the best way to train yourself and catch the industry’s eye is to simply go out there and do what you’d like to get paid for, producing content for the community.

By Shelby Reiches