Swedish video game programmer
Jens Peder Bergensten (born 18 May 1979), also known as Jeb or Jeb_, is a Swedish video game programmer and designer. He is best known as the lead designer of Minecraft,[1][2][3] and is the Chief Creative Officer of Mojang Studios. In 2013, he, along with Minecraft creator Markus Persson, was named as one of Time's 100 most influential people in the world.[4] As an employee of Mojang Studios, he had been co-developing Minecraft with Persson since 2010, became the lead designer in 2011, and assumed full control in 2014, when Persson left the company after its acquisition.[5]
Personal life
Jens Peder Bergensten[6] was born on 18 May 1979[7][8] in Örebro, Sweden.[9]
On 11 May 2013, Bergensten married photographer Jenny Bergensten (née Thornell).[10] On 10 December 2015, Bergensten had a son, Björn.[11]
Career
Bergensten started programming his first games at 11 years old, using BASIC and Turbo Pascal.[12] By age 21, he was a mapper and modder for the first-person shooter game Quake III Arena.[13] He worked as a C++ and Java programmer for the game developer Korkeken Interactive Studio, which went bankrupt and became Oblivion Entertainment.[14] After the insolvency of Oblivion Entertainment, Bergensten moved to Malmö and earned a master's degree in computer science at Lund University in 2008.[12][15]
Early standalone projects
During his time working at Korkeken, Bergensten spent his free time leading the development for the online role-playing game Whispers in Akarra, which entertained a small playerbase of several hundred players. He later discontinued this project after straying from the team's original creative vision for the project.[16] Bergensten publicly released the world editors and source code for Akarra's server client in 2008.[17]
Afterwards he founded the indie game development company Oxeye Game Studio with Daniel Brynolf and Pontus Hammarber, who wanted to create a spiritual successor to Whispers in Akarra.[citation needed] The studio's first project was Dawn of Daria, a self-described "massively-multiplayer fantasy life simulator".[citation needed] After several public alpha tests, the project was discontinued like its predecessor, and Oxeye Games Studio switched their focus to various game jam project and tech demos.[citation needed] The company was soon known for the real-time strategy game Harvest: Massive Encounter[citation needed] and later the platform games Cobalt and Cobalt WASD.
Until 24 November 2010, Bergensten worked for the online knowledge community; Planeto.[18][19]
Mojang Studios
In November 2010, Bergensten was hired as Mojang's back-end developer for Scrolls (now known as Caller's Bane). He later began programming increasingly significant parts of Minecraft until he became its lead designer in December 2011, taking over from Markus Persson.[2] Bergensten was part of the team that developed Catacomb Snatch as part of Humble Bundle Mojam, a game jam.[citation needed] In recent years Bergensten has been featured in the teaser videos for Minecraft Live along with Agnes Larsson.
Currently, Bergensten serves as the Chief Creative Officer of Mojang Studios.[20]
