End Poem

Not to be confused with The End (poem).

The End Poem is a poem by Julian Gough that appears in the end credits of the video game Minecraft. It is the only narrative text in the mostly unstructured sandbox game. Markus "Notch" Persson, Minecraft's creator, invited Gough to create the poem in 2011; it initially appeared in Beta version 1.9. The poem takes the form of a 1,500-word dialogue between two unspecified, godlike entities, discussing what the player has done in the game, which it compares to a dream. Critical reception of the poem has been mostly neutral to positive, often emphasising its oddness; it has been positively received among Minecraft fans.

In 2022, Gough wrote that he had never signed a contract with Persson's Mojang Studios nor with Microsoft, which bought Mojang in 2014. Motivated by the poem's own words that "you are love" and the love he had received from fans of the poem, Gough decided to release a version of the poem into the public domain rather than entering a legal dispute with Microsoft.

Creation and use in Minecraft

Julian Gough wrote the End Poem for the end credits of Minecraft at the request of Markus "Notch" Persson. According to Gough, Persson contacted him in 2011, after tweeting that he was looking for recommendations for talented writers. Gough says that Persson gave him broad latitude in composing a written work for the end of the game. Gough had played Minecraft in alpha at a game jam but had not thought much of it, and was unaware of its popularity until Persson reached out to him. Gough played it some more and then wrote the poem. The poem debuted, alongside the rest of the end credits and the full endgame mechanics, in Beta version 1.9.

The poem comes on-screen after players kill the Ender Dragon, thus winning the game, and step into the End Portal. It plays alongside the track "Alpha" from C418's soundtrack album Minecraft – Volume Beta. It begins with the words "I see the player you mean" in teal and a reply of the active player's name in green, followed by about 1,500 words of dialogue between the two speakers, whose identities are never established but have been described in The Escapist as "god-like". Small portions are intentionally rendered as glitched text. The poem culminates with twelve consecutive lines starting "and the universe said", ending with:

[green] and the universe said I love you because you are love.

[teal] And the game was over and the player woke up from the dream. And the player began a new dream. And the player dreamed again, dreamed better. And the player was the universe. And the player was love.

[teal] You are the player.

[green] Wake up.

The poem scrolls across the screen over the course of about nine minutes; speeding it up by manually scrolling is made intentionally difficult, however, it can be exited with the escape key. It is the only narrative text in the game, and the only text of significant length oriented toward the player. As of December 2022, it has not been significantly modified from Gough's original version.

Reception

An early impression by Eric Limer in The Mary Sue was sharply critical, calling the End Poem "nothing but a bunch of text that scrolls down the screen excruciatingly slowly for an excruciatingly long time", which "reads like a stereotypical JRPG ending mashed up with some stuff written by a highschooler who just discovered post-modernist literature." Subsequent commentary leans more favourable: Kevin Thielenhaus in The Escapist calls the poem "mysterious, and kind of weird, and probably not what most of us were expecting from a Minecraft ending". The Atlantic's James Parker calls it "a goofy/beautiful metaphysical text". Ted Litchfield in PC Gamer describes it as "warm and humanistic" and compares it to the 2015 video game Undertale and the 2017 multimedia narrative 17776. Gough himself has called the work an "oddity" and "peculiar".

A tattoo quoting from the poem, set in a font similar to Minecraft's. Gough used an image of the same tattoo when discussing the poem's impact.

Jason Anthony in gamevironments and Matthew Horrigan in Acta Ludologica both highlight the End Poem's comparison of video games to dreams; Anthony also discusses the poem's relevance to the theological implications of Minecraft players' ability to create and destroy worlds. Jacob Creswell in Comic Book Resources also analyses the poem's commentary on dreams and its reference to life as "the long dream" in comparison to "the short dream of a game". Creswell notes the dissimilarity between the lengthy poem and the minimalist game, but concludes that they fit well together, writing that "[t]he poem disagrees with the idea that the player is nothing compared to the grand scale of the universe" and that "[t]he game's code creates a world that players invest time and care into, much like their real lives". Similarly, in MIT Technology Review, Simon Parkin observes that most players will never encounter the poem in-game, but finds that the two share a sentiment of creation through dream, which Parkin views as revealing the game's "somewhat evangelical" nature.

The Irish Independent describes the End Poem as revered by the Minecraft community. A number of fans have tattoos of excerpts, particularly from the "and the universe said" portion, which Gough has described as "beyond moving".

Copyright status

Gough was reluctant to include the line "The Universe said I love you because you are love" because he did not believe it at the time; however, after two psilocybin trips near Apeldoorn, Netherlands, he stated that he realized that he had been hiding from the love that fans had expressed for the poem and that he had to "complete the circuit" and "accept, and act on" that line of the poem.

In a December 2022 post on his Substack blog, The Egg and the Rock, Gough wrote that he had never signed any contract with Persson's Mojang Studios over the poem, rather relying on an informal agreement that Mojang could use it in the existing Windows and OS X versions of the game. He said that he was paid €20,000 (equivalent to €25,749 in 2023) and corresponded with Mojang managing director Carl Manneh about signing a formal agreement, but did not reach any prior to Mojang's sale to Microsoft in 2014. The full legal implications of the resulting situation were unclear, and Gough wrote that he did not wish to have any legal dispute with Microsoft. Explaining his psilocybin-induced realization, he then placed the poem (specifically the version he had sent Persson) into the public domain using a CC0 dedication.

Microsoft did not respond to press inquiries about Gough's blog post, which Gough alleges led an unnamed global news organisation to "los[e] their nerve" about running a piece that would have confirmed his narrative. Jez Corden of Windows Central expressed scepticism that a lack of comment would have exerted any pressure on such an organisation. Sean Hollister of The Verge speculated that the obstacle for news organisations was the difficulty of verifying that Gough had never signed a contract.