Chris van der Kuyl: dad bringing home Apple II got me started

Like most video game fans, Chris van der Kuyl caught the bug when he first got his hands on a computer as a youngster.

“I was about nine, my dad was a teacher and he would bring home an Apple II computer at the weekends,” says the chairman and co-founder of 4J Studios, the Scottish developer behind the console versions of the hit world-building game Minecraft, created for the PC by Sweden’s Mojang.He adds: “I was completely hooked, and had a desire to learn how it worked and how to make my own things for it. I never stopped.”

While at school in Dundee, van der Kuyl met fellow 4J founder Paddy Burns and the two would go on to make their mark in an industry worth more than £4 billion the UK alone.

“Growing up in and around Dundee, you had this cohort of folk, including [Lemmings creator] Dave Jones, who were a few years ahead of us and got some Spectrum games published and by the time we got to university we were working on Amiga games.

“Funnily enough, back then in the mid- to late-80s, we got a little bit sniffy about it. We were all about wanting high-powered machines and 3D graphics. So I started a little company building graphics software for IBM and Intel and all sorts of cool stuff.”

MinecraftIn 1996, van der Kuyl’s first business officially became a games company called Vis Entertainment. Fast-forward two decades and 4J has just received a trophy from Mojang owner Microsoft for selling more than 20 million copies of Minecraft for the Xbox 360 console – a record that he says will never be beaten.“That award means we are now the most successful game on Xbox 360 ever, and there will never be anything more successful because the console’s at the end of its life now.

An Apple II

“The sales projections for Xbox 360 were somewhere between 650,000 at the lowest end and the most optimistic projection was maybe two million. We did the deal with Microsoft and Mojang thinking we’d be really happy if we sold one million copies – we did that in the first week. It’s nuts.”

4J, which has offices in Dundee and East Lothian, is now developing a version of Minecraft for Nintendo’s forthcoming Switch console, and van der Kuyl says: “We’ve been working on that in secret for a number of months. We have a special Nintendo room that only certain people are allowed into. Switch looks great – I think it’s going to do fantastically well.”