Minecraft creator provides a walkthrough of his earlier works

Markus "Notch" Persson is a superstar in the gaming world these days, with his indie game Minecraft breaking sales records even before an official release. But all those blocks weren't built in a day -- Notch had quite a few old Turbo Pascal projects, it turns out, before Minecraft hit it big, and he's got a nice gallery of them online.

You can browse through and see all of his old efforts, from an RPG called Rubylands, to a pretty impressive RTS title (though Notch says the AI was a mess). There are some Minecraft influences in there to find, most notably in a first-person view of a blockworld, and in a random terrain generator "probably inspired by Populous," Notch says. And we'll have to see if any of these earlier titles carry any of their influences on into Scrolls.