![]() “I’ve even received PayPal donations from Microsoft employees! That was a pleasant surprise,” Gough said. Gough told Kotaku its been interesting seeing his Twitter thread receive a support from fellow writers and folks in the video games industry. ![]() “If they made a bad objection, we could have shown them proof that we were right, and published.” If they made a good objection, we could have changed a few lines, and published,” Gough wrote. “If they said or did anything, we could have reacted to it. ![]() Had Gough’s ending been for “some tiny little indie company with no legal department,” he says getting news out about his ending poem, would not have faced such high levels of “scrutiny” and obsessive fact-checking by lawyers. Thanks for reading this far! And happy new year… Kotaku reached out to Microsoft for comment but did not receive a reply.Īnd here’s the first tweet, if you want to retweet this thread. And that was too much risk for the media organisation’s lawyers, because Microsoft 1700 lawyers and unlimited financial firepower.” “Without a comment, even a ‘no comment’, it was impossible to tell what Microsoft knew or planned to do. The lawyers at the media organisation, understandably but annoyingly, lost their nerve,” Gough wrote. Rather than making a big deal out of news only to make the news become a bigger story, the article was scrapped. According to the writer, Microsoft’s silence was the company’s way of circumventing the Streisand effect. When the undisclosed media organisation reached out to Microsoft, Gough says the company refused to reply. A terrific editor at a major global media organisation read the piece, and got in touch.” So I wrote a long piece on Substack, telling the story,” Gough wrote in the Twitter thread. “But there’s no point giving people a present if they don’t KNOW they’ve been given it. Gough said he put Minecraft’s ending under the public domain was so that players would be free to do whatever they liked with it, whether that’s using the poem in a school play, making T-shirts and posters of it, or painting it on the side of a van. It’s tragic, because the best writers can really elevate the whole game, at every level.”Īfter taking shrooms in the Netherlands, Gough decided to take the Minecraft Poem End under public domain through a Creative Commons licence, according to his own account of the story, which he shared on Substack in December 2022. “Video games are a great artform, potentially the greatest artform, but the industry as a whole frequently doesn’t treat writers with respect or understanding, and so it often doesn’t get the best out of them. “I’m lucky in that I don’t give a shit about working in the video games industry, so I can just tell the truth and whatever happens, happens,” Gough told Kotaku. It’s free to play with, like Shakespeare, and the Bible. So the End Poem is now covered by a CC0 1.0 Universal (CC0 1.0) Public Domain Dedication. In the thread, Gough uploaded a photo of the contract Microsoft allegedly sent that Gough refused to sign in 2011 and in 2014. According to Gough, he was never under contract with Mojang when he wrote the game’s ending, meaning he owned the copyright over the poem, not the corporation. The contract would sign over Gough’s rights to Mojang and later parent company Microsoft. Gough said he was pressured into signing a contract with Mojang Studios, and later Microsoft after the company purchased the studio back in 2014, after the ending had already been implemented in the game. In a lengthy Twitter thread, Irish writer Julian Gough recounted meeting Minecraft creator, Markus Persson 11 years ago and writing the narrative ending for the adventure game, Minecraft’s End Poem.
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