The sound of pixels

Millions of people know his music, but very few know him. A producer of video game music, Daniel Rosenfeld works behind the scenes. Born in 1989 in the German state of Saxony, the musician, using the pseudonym C418, composed the first soundtrack for the best-selling video game to date: Minecraft. While gamers use square blocks to construct their own world, his melodies play in the background. The music has long been appreciated in its own right too, however. On the streaming service Spotify, for example, the Minecraft albums are among the most successful gaming soundtracks, having chalked up nearly a billion streams.

It was more by chance that Rosenfeld’s music became the sound of Minecraft. In the late 2000s, he got to know Markus Persson, the Swedish developer of the hit game, in an online video gaming community. In one of the rare interviews that Rosenfeld gave to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the first Minecraft album in 2021, he recalled how the collaboration came about: “I was just hanging around in this chat forum, sharing my stuff there and chatting about it with others. Markus was doing the same. We came across each other there and hit it off immediately. Markus wanted my music in his game.” UK music educator David Bennett describes the game’s sound as follows: “Drawing influence from the likes of Brian Eno, Steve Reich and Erik Satie, Minecraft’s music is dripping with character, yet remains humble and non-invasive during gameplay.”

The rest is video game history. Just a month after the beta version was published in 2011, it exceeded the one million mark, and had sold nine million copies by the end of 2012. Ten years later, the game had sold more than 230 million times.  

Rosenfeld, who was born in East Germany in 1989, shortly before the fall of the Berlin Wall and German reunification in 1990, shuttled back and forth between Berlin and Toronto in Canada following the success of his music. He now lives in Austin in the USA. Though he is no longer responsible for the new Minecraft soundtracks, many of his fans from that time have remained loyal to him. Rosenfeld published solo albums and composed the theme music for the Netflixseries “Beyond Stranger Things”. Though Rosenfeld virtually never gives interviews, he did announce his next soundtrack in 2021 - describing it as “groundbreaking”. 

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