We’re sure many of you have seen or heard about Notch’s post-Minecon tweets, which were not what we expected to see when we got off the plane from Minecon – we’ve had a sleep now and recovered a bit, so this is our response:
We are very disappointed by these tweets from someone we admire and respect. We can understand that it was the morning after the deadmau5 party and Notch was very tired, but we are still fairly upset. The quotes and actions that Notch attributed to us were not said by us or published anywhere by us. Therefore we are surprised and confused about where this stuff has come from - especially since the only time we spoke to Notch was at the interview.
Regarding dropping f-bombs at the show - we apologise for this, but had rehearsed the whole show in front of the organisers and half of Mojang and they had approved it. We were given no guidelines or oversight in the weeks leading up to Minecon and there were ample opportunities at the rehearsal for Mojang to inform us of problems, such as being careful about swearing, which is pretty common in our youtube videos.
Out of all the tweets that Notch sent out, most hurtful was the accusation that we told a kid to “fuck off” and crossed out another signature – which is something we would never ever do.
We loved spending time with fans and were overwhelmed by how many people were there to support us and give us gifts. Simon has enough Jaffas to last him until the middle of 2012. The problem was that Minecon is a new show and organisation was pretty bad, and when we came to the scheduled signing sessions, nothing had been set up for us and we had to scrabble around to fetch tables, ropes and pens ourselves. With some younger kids around, it was our priority to make sure everything was safe, as we have seen injuries in the past.
This lack of organization contributed to long and confused lines and we were heartbroken to have to turn away so many people when we ran out of time. Simon can only handle a certain amount of time between cups of coffee and nicotine tablets before collapsing, but we made a real effort to get out there and managed to do about six hours of signing. Although we were frustrated, we would never have treated fans in the way that Notch suggested we did.
We were also unhappy and surprised that a week before Minecon, Mojang informed us that they had sold the rights to livestream our show and content to IGN – they hadn’t asked us, they hadn’t spoken to us – they just sold it. Because of this, we nearly cancelled the trip, but decided to say “balls to it” and come anyway, because we felt we owed it to the fans. Hannah actually spoke with IGN directly earlier, and they agreed to take their video down and let us put the videos up on our channel, so a big thanks to them for that.
We were not paid, and never demanded to be paid. We asked for some support, and Mojang said they could offer us two hotel rooms for the duration of the stay and a small boardroom to rest in. We spent a huge amount of money on flights, rooms, food and equipment for the 10 people that we brought along to support us, act as security, make videos/posts and generally help out. We also gave away 100 special t-shirts for free.
The reason we came to Minecon is because we wanted to thank you guys and meet the community that we love and are a part of. We couldn’t have gotten to where we are now without you guys, and so we decided to eat the costs of attending and just have fun. This is why we spent our panel giving a voice to loads of talented people that couldn’t attend but have made Minecraft what it is today.
We’re not gonna stop making videos, not going to stop loving you guys, and hopefully we’ll see you at more gaming conventions in the future.
Lewis & Simon & Hannah
