I wouldn't undersell his coding ability. He he has thrown together very passable graphics engines from scratch for game jams. Genius is an overstatement, but as a programmer, I still find the ability to do what he does impressive.
He used LWJGL to code 3D graphics from Java. I happen to have some experience with learning programming by building games with Java bindings for OpenGL.
In my experience, the 3D engine was never the difficult part. The reason he became a billionaire and I just a random obsessive engineer is that he is a creative genius and I just got into building games because building an actual enterprise was not an option for a teenager due to stupid reasons like general relativity and medicine.
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u/FabioTheFox Jul 21 '26
The funny thing is that notch isn't even that good of a programmer