Jens Bergensten


Jens "Jeb" Peder Bergensten is a Swedish video game designer. Since December 2010, he has worked for the video game developer Mojang Studios as a programmer and game designer, becoming the lead designer of the sandbox game Minecraft in 2011, which has since become the bestselling video game of all time. In 2013, he was named as one of Time 100 most influential people in the world.

Career

Bergensten started programming his first games at 11 years old using BASIC and Turbo Pascal. By age 21, he was a mapper and modder for the first-person shooter Quake III Arena. Later he worked as a C++ and Java programmer for the game developer Korkeken Interactive Studio, which went bankrupt and became Oblivion Entertainment. During that time he led the development for the online role-playing game Whispers in Akarra, which he later discontinued after straying from the team's original creative vision for the project.
After the insolvency of Oblivion, Bergensten moved to Malmö and earned a master's degree in computer science at Lund University in 2008. During his studies he founded the indie game development company, Oxeye Game Studio, along with Daniel Brynolf and Pontus Hammarber. The studio became known for the platform game Cobalt and the real-time strategy game .
Until 24 November 2010, Bergensten worked for the online knowledge community, Planeto.

Mojang

In November 2010, Bergensten was originally hired as Mojang's backend developer for Scrolls, but began programming more and more significant parts of Minecraft until he took over its development completely on 1 December 2011 after Markus Persson stepped down from this position. Bergensten was part of the team that developed Catacomb Snatch as part of the Humble Bundle Mojam event where game developers create a game from scratch in 60 hours. He has also attended many Game jams with Mojang.

Personal life

On 11 May 2013, Bergensten married Jenny Bergensten.
On 10 December 2015, Bergensten had a son, Björn.

Games