Jens Peder Bergensten, born on May 18, 1979, is a Swedish video game programmer and designer. He is professionally known as Jeb. He is best known as the main designer of the game Minecraft. He is also the chief creative officer at Mojang Studios. In 2013, he and Markus "Notch" Persson, the creator of Minecraft, were named among Time's 100 most influential people in the world. While working at Mojang Studios, he helped create Minecraft with Persson starting in 2010. He became the main designer in 2011. In 2014, he took full control of the game after Persson left the company following its acquisition.

Personal life

Jens Peder Bergensten was born on May 18, 1979, in Örebro, Sweden. On May 11, 2013, Bergensten married photographer Jenny Bergensten, who was formerly known as Thornell. On December 10, 2015, Bergensten and his wife had a son named Björn.

Career

Bergensten began programming his first games at age 11 using BASIC and Turbo Pascal. By age 21, he worked as a mapper and modder for the first-person shooter game Quake III Arena. He later became a C++ and Java programmer for Korkeken Interactive Studio, a game development company that went bankrupt and was renamed Oblivion Entertainment. After Oblivion Entertainment became insolvent, Bergensten moved to Malmö and earned a master’s degree in computer science from Lund University in 2008.

While working at Korkeken, Bergensten spent his free time leading the development of the online role-playing game Whispers in Akarra, which had a small group of several hundred players. He later stopped the project after moving away from the team’s original creative vision. In 2008, Bergensten publicly released the world editors and source code for Akkarra’s server and client.

Afterward, he co-founded the indie game development company Oxeye Game Studio with Daniel Brynolf and Pontus Hammarberg. The team aimed to create a game inspired by Whispers in Akarra. Their first project was Dawn of Daria, described as a "massively multiplayer fantasy life simulator." After several public alpha tests, the project was discontinued, like its predecessor. Oxeye then shifted its focus to game jam projects and technology demonstrations. The company later became known for the real-time strategy game Harvest: Massive Encounter and the platform games Cobalt and Cobalt WASD.

From November 2007 until November 24, 2010, Bergensten worked for the online knowledge community Planeto. In November 2010, he joined Mojang as a back-end developer for Scrolls (now called Caller’s Bane). He later took on more significant programming tasks in Minecraft and became its lead designer in December 2011, replacing Markus Persson. Bergensten was part of the team that developed Catacomb Snatch for Humble Bundle Mojam, a game jam event. In recent years, he has appeared in teaser videos for Minecraft Live alongside Agnes Larsson.

Currently, Bergensten holds the position of chief creative officer at Mojang Studios.

Ludography

• Harvest: Massive Encounter (2008)
• Minecraft (2011)
• Caller's Bane (2014)
• Cobalt (2016)
• Cobalt WASD (2017)