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.