After two and a half years of Alpha and Beta development, the full version of Minecraft was released.
Markus “Notch” Persson came up with the idea for Minecraft during his “off-hours” from work, and after a weekend of programming, he released the first Alpha for private testing on May 16, 2009. After working tirelessly for five years, Persson was rewarded rather well when he sold his shares of Minecraft to Microsoft for $2.5 billion in 2014.