Also Notch spammed 4chan with the game anonymously for awhile to drum up some interest.
Also he made a highly viral video of him building a minecart rollercoaster during his paid (but cheaper, I believe it was $13, and he was telling people that was half the price that it would be on official release) beta which he got Kotaku and Penny Arcade to share with their massive audience and suddenly he was a millionaire pretty much overnight.
I personally saw the minecart rollercoaster video while browsing Kotaku and that's how I discovered the game.
Notch absolutely marketed and knew how to market his game. He may have not had an advertising budget, but he made the right type of content and the right type of advertising, then shared it with the right types of promotional avenues to reach his target audience to get enough of a start that word-of-mouth advertising could pretty much take over. And that's all marketing really is.
And since then (especially since Microsoft bought Minecraft) you better believe that game has had lots of money dumped into its marketing.
It's just that most things aren't as sexy as a build-your-own-minecart-rollercoaster-brick-by-brick-and-ride-it-in-first-person and therefore require a lot of money to get it in front of enough people.
Your story is accurate to as much as I remember it too, though a key element often forgotten in Notch's story is he'd already built a lot of small, throwaway games that had pretty much bombed and essentially learnt the lesson of what a lack of marketing could do the hard way before he got to MC.
Sure, I don't doubt that. Failure is one of the best teachers.
I've experienced many marketing failures for video games as well (both games I made myself and games I worked on for other companies), I should be an expert on it by now. Guess that means I should make a new game and apply all those lessons I learned :P.
Also he made a highly viral video of him building a minecart rollercoaster during his paid (but cheaper, I believe it was $13, and he was telling people that was half the price that it would be on official release) beta which he got Kotaku and Penny Arcade to share with their massive audience and suddenly he was a millionaire pretty much overnight.
I personally saw the minecart rollercoaster video while browsing Kotaku and that's how I discovered the game.
Notch absolutely marketed and knew how to market his game. He may have not had an advertising budget, but he made the right type of content and the right type of advertising, then shared it with the right types of promotional avenues to reach his target audience to get enough of a start that word-of-mouth advertising could pretty much take over. And that's all marketing really is.
And since then (especially since Microsoft bought Minecraft) you better believe that game has had lots of money dumped into its marketing.
It's just that most things aren't as sexy as a build-your-own-minecart-rollercoaster-brick-by-brick-and-ride-it-in-first-person and therefore require a lot of money to get it in front of enough people.