Stone Marshall's Blog, page 152

Another Set of Minecraft Updates Released

After the most recent patches were released a couple of days ago in the form of Title Update 54 for Minecraft: Xbox 360 Edition and Title Update 44 for Minecraft: Xbox One Edition, it seems that a few issues were also unleashed after gamers downloaded the updates to eagerly earn the newly added achievements. Mojang has not wasted any time in getting the issues fixed as Title Update 45 for the Xbox One, and Title Update 55 for the Xbox 360, have both gone live.

These two new patches will hopefully rid Minecraft of the new problems that had been discovered. Take a look at the short list, which is the same for both versions, to see what issues have been resolved:

Fix for issue causing the loss of Shulker Box contents on loading from a previous save.
Fix for Empty Bucket not being returned to inventory after crafting a Cake.
Fix for Furnaces not leaving an Empty Bucket after using a Lava Bucket as fuel.
Fix for efficiency enchantments on tools not working correctly.
Fix for pistons not extending when the piston above them extends.
Fix for Horse armour not appearing on horses that don’t have markings.
Fix for Pistons no longer being available in the Crafting menu.
Fix for observers outputting constant power if they can detect changes from another observer.

Load up Minecraft, download the new update and see if it has been made a little bit more trouble-free to earn the new achievements.

Another Set of Minecraft Updates Released

‘Adventure Time’ Is Live on ‘Minecraft’, and the Marketplace Got New Stuff

Good news, Adventure Time fans. Minecraft‘s [$6.99] latest update just added the Adventure Time mash-up pack that lets you explore the Land of Ooo and its crazy, colorful characters. As you can see from the trailer below, the two worlds blend very nicely together, and I’m sure it will be a fun pack for fans of the show or for those who want to sprinkle some more absurdness into their Minecraft worlds. You can also read an interview with Pendleton Ward, the creator of Adventure Time, where he talks about the origins of the animated show as well as the way Minecraft and Adventure Time dovetail nicely.

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In addition to the Adventure Time mash-up pack, we got new stuff on the Marketplace that will make your summer gaming more fun. There’s Summer Mini Games Festival by Noxcrew that let’s you play mini-golf, blocksketball, and try out the shooting range. There’s also Spleef in a volcano and Splashdown in a luxury boat. We also got Wisteria Grove, which is all about adventuring among the massive trees of a mystic grove in your survival spawn, and The Kingdom of Torchwall, a sprawling survival map with tons of things to explore and fight.

‘Adventure Time’ Is Live on ‘Minecraft’, and the Marketplace Got New Stuff

You can get a two thousand dollar scholarship just by writing about Minecraft

Education is expensive. At least, in America it is. That’s why, to many people, scholarships are important – they help those that can’t or struggle to afford higher education pay for it. And, for another year, Apex Minecraft Hosting will be offering a $2,000 scholarship to a student who can write a damn good essay.

Here’s some of the best seeds to get a cool Minecraft world started.

The only limits are that you must be a United States citizen, enrolled in college or high school, and must have a 3.0 or higher GPA – other than that, it’s all down to a 500 word essay you write about the role of Minecraft as an education and career tool. It’s not even about who has the highest GPA, as long as yours is over 3.0, you’re in the running.

Last year’s winner – who was not named – focused on the computer science side of things, such as redstone circuitry being used to teach fundamentals of logic gates. You can see his full essay – as well as a few honourable mentions – over on the official announcement post.

If you’re looking to apply, you can do so at the link here. You’ve got until July 31 to get your application in, so spend a few weeks honing your essay to be the best it can be! Best of luck to those of you that do apply!

You can get a two thousand dollar scholarship just by writing about Minecraft

Minecraft competition brings fights and fist bumps to the Sydney Opera House

If ever there was an event specifically designed to send the regular Sydney Opera House clientele into a near-fatal frenzy of monocle popping, it was this one: a video game festival hosted at Australia’s most famous cultural icon.

But whatever misgivings one may have about Minecraft at the Opera House, when I arrive the mood is buoyant.

Children weave in and out of bollards, cleaving the air with plastic pixilated swords, taking selfies with giant cardboard renderings of pigs, llamas and box-headed humans. More still stand in line to meet the “celebrities of Minecraft” – a concept that would be impossible to even begin to explain to someone 10 years ago. Others are marshalled into groups, waiting side stage in the concert hall to take part in Australia’s first Minecraft tournament.

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The parents take in the scene with an air of contented bafflement.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Parents watch ‘with an air of contented bafflement’ as their kids play Minecraft. Photograph: Tim da-Rin

Their confusion is understandable: on the surface, Minecraft as a popular game, let alone an international phenomenon, is hard to explain.

Created by Markus “Notch” Persson in 2009, Minecraft is what’s known as a “sandbox” game – a genre typically defined by an absence of clear goals or win conditions, and an emphasis on creation and free-play. In Minecraft you are born without ceremony or context into a world made up of blocks. These blocks can be mined and placed in any configuration the player desires, and for this reason the game is often described as an environment where you can build “anything you can imagine”.

To a degree this is true, although it does suggest that the collective imagination of the hive mind is overwhelmingly preoccupied with creating enormous effigies of Super Mario. In the past, players have used the game’s universe to build painstaking reconstructions of Taj Mahal, the International Space Station and – of course – the Sydney Opera House.

Australia’s first Minecraft tournament is playing out in the main concert hall. With three sessions over the course of the festival, and each session comprising seven rounds with 48 children per round, over a thousand kids will compete over the two days. At the start of each round, four dozen children are marshalled on to stage, organised through a system of coloured wristbands that, throughout the hours I am at the event, I will never understand.

The version of the game used for competition is rapid and combat-based and so this experience is less about the unchained power of the imagination and more about shoving one another into big pools of lava. There is little to no mining or crafting in this iteration of the game, and at the end of each round, the winning children are interviewed by the host, who quizzes them on their strategies, their faces projected on to a gigantic screen at the back of the stage.

According to an astonishingly fashionable kid in a leather jacket and asymmetrical haircut, the trick is to “get a weapon and run”. The host can’t fault this and asks for a high five. Leather jacket kid opts for a fist bump.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The version of Minecraft used for competition is rapid and combat-based. Photograph: Tim da-Rin

Outside the concert hall, the back foyer bar hosts banks of PCs manned (child-ed?) by dozens of kids working on a more recognisable form of the game. Block by block, like the medieval lords of yore, they build enormous garrisons, undertake large-scale agricultural projects and – possibly less like the medieval lords of yore – ward off demented skeletons with swords forged from pure diamonds. This space in the Opera House typically given over to baby boomers quaffing $14 riesling is now full of kids waiting in line (it must be said, far more patiently than I’ve seen boomers queue for riesling) for the chance to make something unique from scratch.

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The popularity of Minecraft content on YouTube and Twitch is staggering: in fact, “Minecraft” is the second-most searched term on YouTube, just behind “music”. Perpendicular to the free-play area there’s another line, this one maybe 50 deep, to talk to Wyld and MrCrayfish: two celebrity Minecrafters with massive profiles on both YouTube and Twitch.

These two affable men sit behind a small table and receive their visitors one at a time, leaning in close to hear deeply technical questions from the kids. The overwhelming majority of these questions are impenetrable to the layman, and watching each and every parent nod along with their kid while one of the experts explains an insanely specialised aspect of, say, complex redstone systems, is genuinely heartwarming.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Jens Bergensten, lead developer and designer of Minecraft, speaks at the Sydney Opera House. Photograph: Tim da-RinTim da-Rin

Like the game itself, the sheer scale of Minecraft’s success can be difficult to comprehend. Statistics can tell part of the story. At the time of writing, around 55 million players log into the game each month; in 2016 the game sold around 55,000 copies per day; and in 2014 it was sold to Microsoft for $1.5b, allowing Persson to retire and pursue another of his passions full-time: being insanely cross on the internet.

The lead developer and designer is now Jens Bergensten, a tall, rake-thin and bearded Swede who, throughout the day at the Opera House, will wander into the foyer to greet fans. The first time I see him he’s at the business end of a massive line of devotees, dutifully signing posters, posing for photos and answering questions.

There’s a calm awkwardness about Bergensten. It gives him an air that’s less “mogul at the helm of a multi-billion dollar empire” and more “viking who has become lost at the shops”.

The live event is meant to reflect the ethos of the game, I’m told by the COO of Mojang, Vu Boi, who has travelled with Bergensten to the event. Just as there’s no one way of playing Minecraft, there’s no one way to experience the day.

He’s not wrong about this, but there’s something else too: the game itself is the second-most perfect encapsulation of the seamless meeting of “high” and “low” art that I can think of (the most perfect being the time that Salman Rushdie became addicted to Super Nintendo). Bringing a video game to the hallowed sails of the Opera House is a neat expression of that philosophy.

Minecraft competition brings fights and fist bumps to the Sydney Opera House

TouchArcade iOS Gaming Roundup: Five Nights at Freddy’s, Minecraft Story Mode, Honor of Kings, and More

Even though the first two days of this week were spent by most Americans celebrating the Fourth of July, there were still a ton of happenings in the iOS gaming arena. Kicking things off was a story surrounding a puzzling update from Five Nights at Freddy’s creator Scott Cawthon. Now, this comes with the massive caveat that Cawthon is no stranger to (intentionally or unintentionally) trolling his audience with updates on the state of development of games in the Five Nights at Freddy’s series, but, you really never know.

If Scott Cawthon is to be believed, he’s been working on Five Nights at Freddy’s 6 but eventually decided to pull the plug on the project due to the pressure that comes from trying to develop another unique entry in the series — particularly with the sky-high expectations surrounding another FNAF sequel. Allegedly, instead he’s going to be working on smaller projects loosely based on the FNAF universe like the upcoming movie, a VR title, and other things.

What has us raising our eyebrows particularly high on this one is that Five Nights at Freddy’s: Sister Location was “delayed” because it was “too scary” and then the game was released four days later. Either way, kids are (still) crazy for FNAF, so it seems worth paying attention to, even if these odd updates seem like a strange way to promote a game.

With Season 3 of Rick and Morty only a few weeks away, Adult Swim has updated Pocket Mortys with online multiplayer battles, new dimensions to explore, and tons of other things. Pocket Mortys features a supremely agreeable free to play system that feels truly optional, and is easily among the best, if not the best Pokemon-like game on the App Store. It’s packed with Rick and Morty fan service, but even if you’ve never seen the show, it’s a fantastic collection and battling game only made better by this update.

Another Rome: Total War port is on the way to the App Store, and this time players will travel back in time to an entirely new scenario that begins with the Macedonians and escalates all the way to the Persian Empire. Rome: Total War – Alexander will launch as a standalone expansion for $4.99 soon. The original iPad port of Rome: Total War was received incredibly well by fans of strategy games, so it seems safe to assume Alexander will be just as good.

Telltale’s Minecraft: Story Mode is a clever mash-up between Telltale’s signature narrative-based games and the Minecraft universe which has practically no story in it at all. The first season of the game spanned eight individual episodes that at times felt a lot like playing a Minecraft-y version of the movie The Goonies. Few details are available yet for the second season except for the trailer and the release date of July 11th, but we’ll be keeping a close eye on this one.

The original Sorcery! is now available for free on the App Store, and is a game everyone should download during this promotion. We’ve written extensively about the game, but CliffsNotes effectively amount to Sorcery! is easily among the best game books on the App Store. If you’ve never played one, imagine Choose Your Own Adventure novels from when you were a kid, but fleshed out to an unbelievable extent. There are two more entries in the series, so if you find yourself enjoying Sorcery! be sure to check out the two sequels.

While it seems like everyone and their brother is riffing on Supercell’s Clash Royale these days, Tilting Point and Simutronics released Siege: Titan Wars this week which is another incredibly polished spin on the formula. Players dispatch swarms of troops and powerful titans, and unleash magic spells in realtime PvP battles. This style of game works incredibly well on mobile, so if you weren’t into Clash Royale for whatever reason, it’s worth giving this one a try.

In Hearthstone news, surrounding rumors, speculation, and legitimate leaks, Blizzard finally announced the next Hearthstone expansion: Knights of the Frozen Throne. Launching next month, Knights of the Frozen Throne is loosely based on the World of Warcraft expansion Wrath of the Lich King, but with the requisite signature Hearthstone twist. New Death Knight Hero cards are being introduced, which provide each class with a new Undead-centric hero power.

Finally, Tencent’s Honor of Kings will be launching globally this year. It’s unlikely you’ve heard of this game unless you’re in China, but Honor of Kings has been unbelievably successful, sporting over 50 million daily active users and raking in over $140 million a month. The game is so popular in China that the developers were actually forced to limit how much people can play it by the Chinese government. It’s a situation that’s almost impossible to believe, but I’m incredibly curious to see how it does outside of Asian markets.

That’s it for this week! As always, if you appreciate these iOS gaming roundups and are interested in way more content like this, head over to TouchArcade where we’re posting iOS game news, reviews, guides, and more all day long. We’ve got an iOS gaming Twitch channel, a fantastic Discord server, and a weekly podcast that are also all worth checking out.

TouchArcade iOS Gaming Roundup: Five Nights at Freddy’s, Minecraft Story Mode, Honor of Kings, and More

Minecraft video game used to design public space in more than 25 developing countries

Local authorities have been “amazed to see that young women from slums could design as architects or urban planners”, according to the co-ordinator of a United Nations initiative using the video game Minecraft to get communities designing their own public spaces.

The Block by Block project is the work of UN-Habitat – the United Nations agency for sustainable urban development – together with the makers of the hugely popular world-building computer game Minecraft, Mojang.

Block by Block is a global UN-run programme in which Minecraft is used as a community participation tool in the design of public spaces, like this one designed for Dandora, Nairobi – the location of the biggest dump site in East Africa

Since 2012, they have used the game to engage communities all over the world — particularly young people, women and slum dwellers – in the design of their local public spaces, and have now reached more than 25 countries. Kenya, Peru, Haiti and Nepal are among the nations to have Block by Block-designed spaces.

Last month, Pontus Westerberg, coordinator of Block by Block, took to the stage at Made In Space, a three-day festival held at Space10 in Copenhagen’s meatpacking district, to explain how the initiative uses Minecraft as a community participation tool in urban design for public space projects all over the world – particularly in poor communities within developing countries.

Communities are able to build into virtual landscapes that correspond to the real-life environment, as in this project in Mogadishu, Somalia, where a market hall has been built on a former waste heap

“They’re quite stale,” said Westerberg, speaking about typical urban planning meetings in local communities. “Generally, a person will stand in a room in front of people who are listening. All the people in the room are above the age of 45 or 50. There are generally no young people, and not so many women.”

“In Kenya where I live, more than 50 per cent of the population is under 25, so finding ways to get young people involved in community space projects is crucial.”

This rendering shows plans for the second phase of the Market Hall development in Mogadishu, Somalia, where 20 years of civil war has severely limited the development of basic urban services

The Block by Block programme organises workshops with 30-to-50 people that live and work around the planned public spaces. Divided into groups of around three or four people, the local residents are taught how to build in the virtual landscape of Minecraft.

“Older residents who have never used computers before are taught by young guys,” explained Westerberg. “So you get this really nice intergenerational communication going on.”

After building projects in Minecraft, stakeholders from local government, the mayor’s office, planners and architects listen to presentations by people who were part of the design process.

Mumbai is one city where Block by Block ran workshops with the people that live and work around the planned public spaces

Speaking about one particular project in Nairobi, Kenya, Westerberg said, “I spoke to the mayor of Nairobi and the head of the urban planning department after the presentations, and they were just amazed to see that young women from slums could actually design as architects or urban planners.”

The ideas from the presentations are put into a final report, which is then given to an architect, who translates the designs and ideas into architectural drawings.

Recent projects include a series of workshops in Hanoi where a group of teenage girls used Minecraft to come up with ideas to improve safety in their local neighbourhood. In Palestine, the organisation worked with 50 teenagers to design a park in East Jerusalem, and in Kosovo an old derelict market space was turned into a public square.

Participants in Mumbai collaborated on this park design in Gautam Nagar – one of 45 resettlement and rehabilitation colonies across the city. The walls surrounding this colony have now been painted with advice about saving water, the environment and waste disposal

Minecraft is the world’s second best-selling video game of all time, with more than 121 million copies sold worldwide. In a virtual landscape, players use textured cubes to build constructions. There are no specific goals set for the player to accomplish, so what they do in the world is up to them.

Using the game, players have recreated real and fictional locations from various time periods, including a 1:1 street layout of Lower Manhattan in the 1930s and the continent of Westeros as featured in George RR Martin’s Game of Thrones novels.

In Nairobi, Block by Block participants imagined a public space with a skate park. Based on the proposals from the community, a detailed design, including the materials to be used, has been developed for costing and construction

Jose Sanchez, the developer behind another architecture-focused video game, Block’hood, told Dezeen last year that the medium was becoming an increasingly important tool for designing cities.

A group of participants in Nairobi proposed street lighting for their scheme

“As architects, we have been trained to think of local scales: small, medium, large and extra large,” he said. “But today we face global issues and we need new tools to address a new kind of scale: a planetary scale.

“By using games, we can engage a global audience in the problems that architecture is facing.”

Danish architect Bjarke Ingels also spoke of the value of Minecraft as a model for engaging communities with urban design at 2015’s Future of Storytelling summit.

Minecraft video game used to design public space in more than 25 developing countries

Telltale Could Bring Other Games on Nintendo Switch after Minecraft

In a few weeks, and more precisely up to August 25, players with a Nintendo Switch will be able to try out the first season of Minecraft: Story Mode. But if everything goes well, other titles of Telltale Games should follow up.

Minecraft: Story Mode Season 1 is currently the only game Telltale has announced for Nintendo Switch, but Head of Communications Job Stauffer did not deny the possibility of seeing other titles of the company on the hybrid platform of the house of Kyoto.

It was at GameSpot that Job Stauffer, director of communication, expressed the interest of the developer on the new machine of Nintendo:

“We haven’t quite announced [Minecraft: Story Mode Season 2 for Switch] but we certainly hope to continue things on that platform; we’re big fans.”

“It wouldn’t be unheard if more of our series also made it to Switch; we love the platform. It’s kind of perfect for what we do. All of our games are the same on mobile as they are on consoles. And for a mobile console [like the Switch] it’s pretty awesome.”

The release date for Minecraft: Story Mode Season 1 on Nintendo Switch has not yet been communicated.

In recent weeks Stauffer also stated that Telltale is discussing a new intellectual property, however, there are no announcements about it. “An original, new IP is definitely still in our future,” Stauffer told Gamespot. “It may not be as immediate as the next few things we have coming up. We haven’t been able to say a lot about it in the last few years.”

What series of Telltale Games do you want to see happen on Nintendo Switch: The Wolf Among Us, Batman, The Walking Dead, or Guardians of the Galaxy? Let us know about it in the comments below.

We remind you that the first episode of Minecraft Story Mode’s second season will arrive on PC, PlayStation 4, Xbox One and mobile devices running on iOS and Android in a few days, on July 11th.

Telltale Could Bring Other Games on Nintendo Switch after Minecraft

Watch the ARKit Bring ‘Minecraft’ and a Measuring Tape to Life

It’s no secret that Apple is betting that AR, and specifically its ARKit, will be a game-changer for the iOS ecosystem, and after seeing some recent examples, I can see why the company is so confident. In the first video, developer Matthew Hallberg shows off his Minecraft [$6.99] AR app that lets players place Minecraft blocks in the real world and then proceed to break them just like they would do when playing the actual game. The video shows how easy it is to create whole Minecraft worlds using ARKit in a way that makes them believable and immersive. Pay attention to how the lights he places interact with the blocks; it’s pretty cool. I can see for instance people making Minecraft mazes for a kid’s birthday party.

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In addition to making gaming applications, developers are also using ARKit to create applications that offer all kinds of extremely useful every-day tools. For instance, the video below shows off an extremely accurate AR measuring tape that you can use to measure objects and spaces in your environment. While this measuring tape might look like a simple little thing, think about all the tools that can easily be replaced through accurate AR, and also think of how many times you had to look for that silly measuring tape just to quickly see if what you’re buying from Amazon will actually fit in your house. And keep in mind that the ARKit is still in beta and has been out for barely a few weeks.

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And there’s an even cooler application of the accuracy of ARKit when combined with Minecraft; designing real buildings for public spaces. You might not remember this story, but last year the United Nations announced that it’s utilizing Minecraft to allow communities to design new public spaces in places like East Jerusalem and Africa. With ARKit, projects like those can be done on the actual spaces they will end up occupying, further engaging communities and blurring the digital and the real world. I’m very excited to see what else developers can come up with once ARKit is out in the wild and once the iPhone 8—with its purported AR focus—releases. Any ideas for any great applications?

Watch the ARKit Bring ‘Minecraft’ and a Measuring Tape to Life

Insider Big Profile Blast from the Past: Minecraft creator Chris van der Kuyl

Chris Van Der Kuyl is one of Scotland’s leading entrepreneurs and the founding chairman of Entrepreneurial Scotland.

This Big Profile article highlights the successes and failures in an eventful business career that has made the Dundonian one of the top figures in Scottish business.

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He is the driving force behind 4j Studios, one of the UK’s most successful video game developers and sits on the baord of many leading Scottish technology businesses.

Chris van der Kuyl is a larger than life character who epitomises the new generation of entrepreneur in Scotland. At six foot six inches tall van der Kuyl cannot fail to be noticed but he has also made the most of his many attributes over the years to put him firmly on the Scottish corporate map.

He rose to prominence in the late nineties and early noughties when he founded computer games company VIS Entertainment which was responsible for one of the best known products in that genre, State of Emergency .

I came across van der Kuyl’s name on my first day as editor of Insider when I read the first issue of the short-lived daily newspaper BusinessAM whose splash was on VIS’s plans for an £80m flotation.

The year before at the 1999 Labour party conference a confident young van der Kuyl had boasted that VIS would grow from a valuation of £20m to £500m within three years. Sadly VIS failed to float and in 2005 crashed when it was sold to a new owner in the US which shortly afterwards hit a financial iceberg taking it down with it.

For many would-be entrepreneurs that might have been the end of the dream but van der Kuyl has now returned to prominence after being hired by Scottish publishing giant DC Thomson to head its digital offshoot brightsolid which grabbed the headlines when it bought Friends Reunited for £25m from ITV last year.

Van der Kuyl’s youthful enthusiasm is still very evident today but is tempered by experience which makes him somewhat more careful about what he says. Brightsolid is set to push turnover over £30m in the current year as it pursues its two main activities as a digital publisher and technology specialist.

The main motivation behind buying Friends Reunited was to get its hands on its Genes Reunited offshoot to enhance its growing portfolio of family history websites. The combination of Genes Reunited together with FindMyPast, ScotlandsPeople.gov.uk – which it manages for National Registers of Scotland and the Court of the Lord Lyon – and ancestorsonboard.com, the online passenger lists records resource it manages for the National Archives, makes it the second biggest online family research brand in the world.

Brightsolid’s online technology division provides online IT business services to blue chips like Standard Life , Scottish Widows, and Clyde Blowers .

But van der Kuyl has also retained his private interests in computer gaming through 4J Studios which has operations in Dundee and East Linton.

So what are the factors which have enabled van der Kuyl to revive his career and bring him back to prominence?

If you look at his background it is easy to see that why he has always stood out from the crowd for reasons apart from his height.

Dundee-born van der Kuyl admits his parents had a significant influence on him. “I think both my parents instilled in me a strong belief there wasn’t any limit to what I could try and achieve and that is something which has stayed with me strongly as a philosophy,” he says.

“I was an only child so that has its merits and challenges. Possibly I am a typical only child in some respects but I would hope people would suggest fairly well grounded.”

His late father Tony van der Kuyl pioneered the use of computers in schools in the late 1970s and led St Saviour’s in Dundee to be the first school in the country to offer computer studies as a recognised subject. “My Dad brought one home to try and do things at weekends and I got a chance to programme it at eight or nine years old and never really stopped from there,” explains van der Kuyl.

He got to understand computer programming intimately because when he started out there was no software to buy. “What everyone did was buy these magazines and you had to type in the listings – the software. So you were effectively by rote coding something else somebody had told you to code but inevitably there were bugs so you started off by working out what had gone wrong. That was remarkably effective at teaching you what these machines were about.

“By the time I was 14 or 15 people were starting to think they could use these small computers for business. IBM provided big databases for larger companies but if you were a small organisation you had no idea what you could do to make it happen.”

As a teenager van der Kuyl used to hang around computer shops and that led to him getting work programming computers for small businesses. “The guy who managed the computer shop would say to me from time to time ‘we have a guy who wants to buy a machine but he needs this to work his business’ so I wrote a system for him.

“I remember writing systems for a guy who traded number plates. He realised if he could get his database on to a computer if somebody came in you could quickly see if you had any registrations that might be of interest to them.

“Because I wrote quite a few small business systems I actually learned about how you administered a business. You learn pretty quickly that it is not about technology – it is about understanding the business process. You say to somebody how do you run your business. What happens when a customer rings up? What kinds of things do you ask them and how do you work out what you are looking for?

“I spent five years on and off working for a local music retailer and wrote their stock control system, VAT, and banking system and that is still the only Chris van der Kuyl-written system which is still in existence today.”

Another van der Kuyl entrepreneurial sideline when he was just 12 was that after finding BT was charging a lot of money for putting in telephone extensions he did it much more cheaply for friends and family. He later worked as a Saturday boy selling shoes and the area manger he met on the first day was Ian Grabiner who now runs Arcadia. They met again a few years later and Grabiner is now a personal friend.

“I loved selling and kind of loved doing a little deal here and there end enjoyed it,” says van der Kuyl.

His earnings were used to buy computers, computer games and music synthesisers. Van der Kuyl played keyboards in a number of local pop bands including Big Blue 72. “We did demos and gigs and started to get some real interest and in 1987 we got to headline some big freshers gigs in Scotland which were big gigs.

“We were getting quite well known in the Scottish scene so the head of A&R for CBS came up to see us for two gigs and got really keen and started talking in terms of signing us up. We were getting ready to do our final demo session in London when Sony bought them and at that point they basically shut the roster and said that is it.

“I remember getting a comment back from them which said we have already got a band from Scotland with blue in the title – Deacon Blue. I don’t think we need another one. Now whether that was a polite way of telling us we were crap – which we weren’t – we were a great band and more likely the victims of corporate rationalisation. It was my first experience of being on the wrong end of a corporate takeover and I vowed to try and not put myself in the same position again.”

Chris is well known to many as one of the men behind the popular game Minecraft. (Photo: Getty)

With his pop career hitting the buffers van der Kuyl went to Edinburgh University to study computer science where he stayed for two years before transferring to Dundee University. “I have always been interested in human computer interaction – how you design software that works for people in as user friendly a way as possible. Edinburgh did some of that but at that time there was a team in Dundee doing fantastic work under a guy called Alan Newell.”

So he went back to his hometown where he had also started working as an intern for cash machine manufacturer NCR. He also managed to persuade NCR to fund him to go to Silicon Valley in the US in 1989 which was to have a huge influence on his future career.

“I’d been reading things and hearing people talking about it about it at university,” he says.

Van der Kuyl put up a proposal to build a SQL database for cash machines which included going to Oracle in the US. “I got to Silicon Valley, aged 19, and I suddenly had my eyes wide open. This place was buzzing.

“You go in a coffee shop and everybody would be talking about software and technology and you feel wow I am meant to be here. These are my kind of people. But I quickly learned when I was there that I didn’t think anybody was any better than me.

“So how could I take advantage of that? Should I get on my bike and go out there? But I enjoyed what I did in Scotland, I liked my friends, I liked Scotland. So I came back more determined than ever that I could do what they were doing there in Scotland.”

By then he had come to the conclusion pretty firmly that he didn’t want a corporate career. “My early stuff had given me a taste for being in business and doing bits and pieces and I decided I was going to start my own business.”

Van der Kuyl Interactive Systems – or VIS – was founded in 1992 and specialised in corporate multi media. “We built the interactive stuff for the Scotch Whisky Heritage Centre on the Royal Mile in Edinburgh. I was doing sales, programming, washing the dishes, you name it. It was very lifestyle. Grow the business get a bit of profit and do fine. But if we wanted to get a bigger product we needed somebody else’s muscle to help us.”

After a couple of years he sold the business to advertising and design agency Baillie Marshall which had spotted the growth in web and digital media. VIS ran inside Baillie Marshall for about 18 months but the games business did not sit comfortably inside the company.

With angel investment backing from Baillie Marshall boss Peter Baillie and internet pioneer Ian Ritchie , who became non executive chairman, he created VIS Entertainment. Within a year it had an agreement from global publishers Hasbro and Interplay to handle its first two video games. It raised further funding from a consortium led by a very small angel syndicate called Elderstreet which later became a much much bigger tech investor led by Michael Jackson the ex chairman of Sage. Also in that consortium was SEP and 3i. “We started off with a strong ambition to grow a global games development studio,” says van der Kuyl.

By coincidence in 1995 the original Playstation made its debut. “We looked at it and said finally there is hardware here where our really great technologists can shine,” he says. “Before that games were pretty low tech in terms of graphics and bringing music and high end animation together – this was the first time it was possible.”

Its first games were HEDZ and Earthworm Jim 3D. The studio started to grow quickly from just four or five to nearly 50. “Neither were enormous hits but they did ok,” admits van der Kuyl.

As well as opening a subsidiary in Glasgow VIS acquired a company on the Isle of Wight called Stainless which had developed the Carmageddon game. “In the late 90s when dotcom fever was happening we were getting a lot of inquiries from our board. Had we considered our strategy? Had we thought about floating?”

“We did a pre IPO deal. We brought Telewest in as a strategic investor in the business and we set up a joint venture company with them to do the world’s first computer generated digital television channel called I-Race which was a 24 hour a day digital horse racing. Part of that was to build the right portfolio business which wasn’t just about core games development. It was going to go further. And we had HSBC on to us with their investment bank and we had all of their documentation ready to go to market.

“And we did a pre-IPO roadshow to test the water. But then the door slammed shut on the dotcom bubble which effectively burst. Whilst we always pitched ourselves as not a dotcom we were caught up in that and HSBC told us there was no way we could go to market.

“So we retrenched back from that and came back fighting fit with the idea for State of Emergency. We had gone out and pitched it to what was quite a new publisher at that point, Rockstar in New York who had had the Grand Theft Auto franchise. The rest of it is history. The game went on in 2002 to be globally number one selling close to two million units and made us a lot of money.

“The year following that VIS was very profitable. We did fantastically well, £10m revenue and £3m or £4m profit. It was a great year and we were feeling pretty good. We knew we had the sequel for State of Emergency coming along down the pipe and we had also signed a game with Sony called Brave.

“But a couple of things happened. We had an issue with Take Two our publishers who were owners of Rockstar. We audited them and found out they were a bit short on our royalty statement which we settled with them but unfortunately following that they decided they didn’t want to keep going with the sequel to State of Emergency.”

At first van der Kuyl was confident it could go alone with the backing of investors. But its main lender HBOS had got its fingers burned at a failed games company in Manchester and would not extend its facility while 3i was not interested in providing further backing. “We were left with a hard core of angel investors and management and didn’t have enough money to complete the products.”

VIS was bought by Nasdaq listed games company BAM. However BAM failed to raise further funds and went bust resulting in VIS going into administration. “I did absolutely everything I possibly could to try and reach a positive outcome. If you are in business there are always peaks and troughs and when you hit something like that it is hard to sit down and rationalise what has happened and rationalise what you are going to do and pick yourself up and get on with it.

“For me what was exceptionally good and vindicates to me the reason I stayed in Scotland was the business community. I was getting phone calls immediately – people wanted to see me. They sat down with me and I got some fantastic advice from people like Sir Angus Grossart and Sir Tom Hunter who said look first things first don’t just run out of the door and try and do whatever you are going to do next. You have been through a tough time and think about it – take your time and make the right decisions. And equally in no way are we doubting your capability to do things.”

Van der Kuyl did a deal with games company Bethesda to finish a game which was in early development which led to another deal. “Before we knew it we had a small but profitable sustainable video games business called 4J Studios. The name comes from Dundee being the three ‘J’s – jute, jam and journalism. The fourth ‘j’ is joysticks.”

His partner in the business is school friend Paddy Burns who was also chief technical officer at VIS. “Paddy has a small team in East Linton doing the heavy R&D stuff for us. We continued on with that and that led us into developing some pretty major products on Playstation 3.

“The biggest one we did was Oblivion for Bethesda. That chain of events led us into doing a number of games. I think we are on to our fifth product with Microsoft. “That has been a very successful relationship over the last three years where we have been developing on the Xbox 360 platform.”

In 2007 he got a call from Sir Angus Grossart, who at that point owned 50 per cent of Scotland Online with DC Thomson. “He asked me to come in and speak with him and DC Thomson. The result of that was they asked me to come in and do a review of the business.”

Scotland Online, which was founded in 1995, had developed into an independent provider of IT business services to large public and private sector organisations. Over the years it had developed a niche in handling genealogy data and had won the contract to run ScotlandsPeople.gov.uk for the General Register Office for Scotland and the National Archives of Scotland.

“I delivered that review and made certain recommendations and they came back to me at the end of the summer and asked would I be interested in coming in and helping them implement it because they liked the strategy. I agreed on the basis that I was not looking for a job but I was very interested in this area and there were things that Scotland Online did that I did not have expertise in but in applying business expertise hopefully that would help me learn more about being symbiotic as it were.

“My initial intention – and I think our understanding collectively – was that we would really look at strengthening the management team, make some big changes and probably in a twelve to eighteen month time period I would become more non executive and let a team come in and get on with it.

“What became clear very, very quickly was that I personally got on very, very well with people at DC Thomson and I felt I was making a big difference.”

In 2007 it acquired genealogy website FindMyPast and the following year rebranded the group as brightsolid. “As every month has gone by there have been more and more opportunities showing themselves and every time I have gone back to the investors with an investment opportunity they have been very supportive in helping build the case and then putting the money into doing it.

“It culminated in the biggest acquisition we have done to date – acquiring Friends Reunited group from ITV. At the same time DC Thomson also bought out 100 per cent of brightsolid”

Van der Kuyl says online technology and online publishing have two very strong managing directors enabling him to work on strategy. “That really gives us the opportunity to build significant value for the business going forward. I think there will hopefully be a couple of big announcements from us over the upcoming months about how we are expanding internationally. Already in the past year we have opened up in Australia and Ireland and we are now starting to look at other major markets for the genealogy side.”

Van der Kuyl says Genes Reunited and Find My Past don’t clash as brands. “There are people who are the real hard core users of family history – findmypast is a brand for them. So it has got more esoteric data sets. As we develop the product there will be more hardcore research tools in there.

“Genes Reunited is much more an entry level platform which is much easier to understand how you get into the hobby of genealogy from day one and then you can use it as a place to build. It is a much more social product as well. It is about sharing a lot of the data.”

Across its family history sites it has around two million unique visitors a month. “We are pretty clearly the second biggest in the world,” he says. “The biggest in the world is Ancestry and the majority of Ancestry’s business is in the US. We are much, much smaller than them globally but we compare pretty favourably in the UK and currently about 70 or 80 per cent of our business is pretty much UK focused. Clearly we think there is an opportunity to grow our overseas user base.”

However it is still growing its UK brand and has been sponsoring all the family history re-runs of Who Do You Think You Are and Heir Hunters on the Yesterday channel and a prime time ITV show called Long Lost Family.

But its most significant development is its own television show using the title FindMy Past which it is producing with UKTV. “It is really quite exciting and will be on air before the end of this year,” says van der Kuyl. “It will be a ten-part show. Because of the change in legislation for product placement it means the show can be called Find My Past and feature the product in the show. It is a substantial investment from us and UKTV together.”

Van der Kuyl is also looking at how to exploit the Friends Reunited brand. “It still commands about two million unique users a month on that one website and we have got 20-million-plus registered users that we can market to. We also hope to be bringing something to market within the year which will be a real substantial move in terms of what Friends Reunited is about and give it a meaningful place in people’s online lives.”

Its Friend Reunited dating agency is one of the top five paid dating site in the UK and it has also launched a new brand called Swoon.co.uk. “We are back into month-on-month growth in those businesses. But watch this space. It is a challenging sector but we are certainly having a go.”

Van der Kuyl says the technology side of the business is going really well and it is in the process of expanding its datacentre. “When I came in one of the assets that Scotland Online had was a data centre in the building but it was very underutilised. We have really been working hard. We have got to the stage where that data centre is going to be full by the end of this summer. So we commissioned and have started a new multi-million investment in a new datacentre which is being built for us by IBM.”

Around 70 to 80 per cent of turnover comes from the publishing side with the rest from technology. Van der Kuyl argues that the combination of the two businesses makes good sense. “We are an online innovation group. It is quite useful to have businesses that have different commercial dynamics. So the online technology business for example is business to business entirely. It is almost always multi-year, long-term contracts so it is like a flywheel. It takes quite a long time to build energy but once energy has built up it is very difficult to stop.

“The publishing business is a consumer proposition. We work on a subscription revenue basis so we have annualised subscriptions and you can dynamically grow that business but equally you can have challenges that happen very quickly.

“If you look at the really big hitters in the online world like Amazon and Google when they got to a certain size they had to build their own big technology base to support the massive growth that they had. We are very fortunate in that we started off having that technology base so when you are out there trying to build massively resilient systems like the 2011 census we built for the Scottish government – we had the infrastructure hosting for that. Equally when we are doing the 1911 census those skills are directly transferable to make sure we can serve customers in a really solid and resilient way.

“So we get a huge benefit from having the technology business close to all these online innovation businesses and I think as time goes on we will have bigger demand on it.”

Van der Kuyl also believes the rebranding of Scotland Online to brightsolid was the right thing to do. “Scotland Online was a fabulous brand for its time and it reflected a consumer-focused internet service provider with content publishing across Scotland. By the time I had come along in 2007 it didn’t really reflect what the business was doing then and certainly not we wanted to do going forward.

“Brightsolid gets people’s interest. It is an unusual name. When we talk to people about how we came up with the name we talk about the fact that we think it reflects us really well. “We are innovative and creative and pushing the boundaries which is the ‘bright’ part and what we understand if we are not absolutely nailed down on delivery and the hosting and utterly reliable which is the ‘solid’ part then we would fall on our face. It really to me reflects the personality of the business really well and people get that.

“I think I had one complaint from an ex-Scotland Online customer who accused me of selling Scotland’s national treasures down the river. I tried to explain look it is time for the business to move on. Even AOL doesn’t call itself America Online anymore.”

He says DC Thomson are very strong and supportive shareholders. “In fact if I look at my career and look at the shareholders I have had over the years they are undoubtedly the strongest shareholder I have ever had not only from a balance sheet perspective but equally from an ethical perspective – how they support and back the business. And that is fantastic place to be.

“I am every bit as entrepreneurial as I have ever been. They know that and that is one of the reasons they support me and build this business because they want and realise it is going to take an entrepreneur to do it. I will hopefully build a lot of value for everybody in this business including myself. That is why I am in business. It is not for any other reason other than to build value and then use that value to build even more business and keep doing it.”

Meanwhile van der Kuyl says he feels enormously optimistic about the future of the games industry in Scotland despite some recent setbacks including the collapse of Dundee-based computer games company Real Time Worlds which was founded by the creator of Lemmings and Grand Theft Auto.

He cites the example of a new games company called Outplay which is being set up in Dundee by Musselburgh-born brothers Richard and Douglas Hare who made their fortunes in the industry in the US. “That is a pretty ringing endorsement for what we can offer,” says van der Kuyl. “There is a lot of talent around. And you always see ups and downs. We have always said the games industry is still in an early stage of its gestation. The first 15-plus years in Dundee is finishing and in the next ten or 15 years I think you will see some of the mature businesses start to come in and, most importantly, I think you will see publishing being based in the hands of some companies that have been based in Scotland.

“It is never nice when things like the Real Time Worlds collapse happen but hopefully from those things new businesses will flourish.

The green shoots are there already and I see us being very positive going forward.”

Insider Big Profile Blast from the Past: Minecraft creator Chris van der Kuyl

‘Minecraft: Switch Edition’: Super Duper Graphics Pack will also release on Nintendo’s console

Minecraft is about to start looking a whole lot better with the introduction of the Super Duper Graphics Pack, originally introduced during E3 2017. Previously it was announced for those who play Minecraft on Xbox One and on PC, but now the graphics pack is actually coming to the Nintendo Switch as well, according to an interview at Kotaku.

Rendering lead Cameron Egbert let the cat out of the bag: “It will be anywhere that you can play Minecraft in the new version. It will improve any screen on which you play, but the best experience will be on Xbox One X.”

Thanks to the “Better Together” initiative from Microsoft, Minecraft is looking to invite all players on various platforms to play together. This includes bringing Switch players onboard as with the upcoming Super Duper Graphics Pack, which makes the blocky look a whole lot more eye-popping.

The update will offer a brand new vision of Minecraft with 4K HDR graphics, improved lighting, water effects, shadows and a whole other smattering of visual improvements. It’s also all coming for free.

The introductory video shows off a good chunk of what to expect from the update, and it looks nearly like a different game. Unfortunately there isn’t a concrete release date just yet. You can expect to see it gracing a Minecraft player’s screen near you this fall.

‘Minecraft: Switch Edition’: Super Duper Graphics Pack will also release on Nintendo’s console