This piece was inspired by Minecraft, a 2011 sandbox game developed by Mojang Studios that was first released in 2009. Programming with Java, Markus "Notch" Persson is the game's original developer. It went through several preliminary stages of private testing before being first made available to the public in May 2009. Notch stepped down and Jens "Jeb" Bergensten took up development, and on November 18, 2011, the product was finally released. About 300 million copies have been sold worldwide.