On Amazon, there are thousands more unofficial titles that fans have self-published, including entire novels set inside the game. (A feature film is also in the works, at Warner Bros.) Since 2013, the children’s publisher Scholastic has published 10 Minecraft titles, which have 25 million copies in print. The game’s user base exploded so rapidly that in 2014, Microsoft bought the company for $2.5 billion.Īs product spinoffs go, a series of novels seems like a natural step for Mojang, which already has a wildly successful publishing line of gaming manuals.

Since its release in 2011, Minecraft has sold more than 122 million copies and now has 55 million active monthly users. The open-ended nature of the game is a big part of its appeal. Instead, it’s more like an elaborate digital Lego set that allows players to build whatever they like, designing their own castles, skyscrapers, underground bunkers and booby traps. Unlike most video and computer games, Minecraft doesn’t have clear-cut objectives or levels to ascend. (To eliminate any doubt about the company’s consent, Mojang’s name and logo appear twice on the book’s cover, which bears the bland endorsement, “Mojang Official Product.”) It marks the first officially sanctioned novel commissioned by Mojang, the Swedish game studio behind Minecraft, as the company seeks new ways to capitalize on the game’s enormous popularity. “Minecraft: The Island,” which was released this month by the science fiction and fantasy publisher Del Rey, represents an unusual experiment in multiplatform brand extension. He’s writing for a very particular tribe: die-hard devotees of the video game Minecraft. Brooks isn’t writing for novices or lay readers. Instead of hands, the narrator has clumsy, flesh-toned cubes, just one more weird feature of the strange and unsettling world where the story unfolds, where everything - the sun, clouds, cows, mushrooms, watermelons - is composed of squares.įor the uninitiated, the setting may seem bizarre and disorienting, but Mr. The protagonist of Max Brooks’s new fantasy novel doesn’t have a name, a gender or even normal human appendages.

Max brooks book